Ten architects are under consideration to design UWs next major building, a home for research and teaching with an environmental and water theme.
The building also has a new name, the UW board of governors was told last week. It will be the Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering, said UW president Dr. James Downey.
He hinted that another word - a personal name - might go in front of the word Centre by the time the building opens, on the same principle as the William G. Davis Centre for Computer Research.
The ESE building, as it has been called until now, is to go on the site now occupied by parking lot B1, and be linked to the engineering complex, the Physics building and Earth Sciences and Chemistry.
"The exact shape of the building hasn't been decided, and it may well spread out around the Physics building from there," says Dr. John Greenhouse of the Earth Sciences Department. Greenhouse has been chairing a user committee for the building since it was just a gleam in a few researchers' eyes. "As chairman of Earth Sciences," he recalls, "I used to whine a lot to the Dean about the fact that we were in 13 buildings!"
"The new building will be, at long last, a home for earth sciences," he says proudly. "The Earth Sciences Department has been like the Palestinians of science," or, to find a less political metaphor, "hermit crabs that never get their own shells." The department has been somewhat consolidated since those difficult days, but researchers still must move between the Earth Sciences and Chemistry building and the off-campus B F. Goodrich Building on Columbia Street West.
A building committee was formed, although, says Greenhouse, "In the early days, we thought it was just another committee meeting to take up time!" But the project became a high priority in Campaign Waterloo, which listed a $22 million goal for 'government' funds as part of the overall $89 million campaign target, and designated most of that money for ESE.
Last October, Ontario premier Bob Rae came to campus and in a ceremony in the Davis Centre great hall, before hundreds of invited guests, announced that the province would give $25.2 million towards the building's cost. Its total budget is $39 million, which includes $26.75 million for construction, $4 million for furnishings and equipment, $750,000 for alterations to vacated space, and $7.5 million for an 'endowment fund' for the continuing maintenance and operating costs.
The difference between $39 million and the government's $25.2 million is to come from private sources through Campaign Waterloo At last report about $2 million had been raised. Greenhouse said, "We've got a few years - I don't think it's a problem." Major donors are likely to be corporations working in environmental and biotechnology fields," he suggested.
The building is to provide 13,880 square metres of new teaching and research space - about 148,000 square feet, the size of the present Psychology building. ("Net assignable square feet in the building will total about 90,000," Greenhouse said.)
Two faculties, science and engineering, will share the new building. It will be the home for the Waterloo Centre for Groundwater Research, now based off campus in the B. F. Goodrich building on Columbia Street. In addition, it will house the Institute for Risk Research and the environmental component of the Biotechnology Research Centre, and it will be the focus for four undergraduate programs: geological engineering, environmental engineering, environmental science, and environmental hydrogeology.
Greenhouse predicted that the project will go to tender in March of 1996, with construction starting shortly after that and the building opening for use in the summer of 1998.
"In December, UW invited submissions from architects interested in designing the building, and about 30 responded by the deadline," says Bob Elliott, associate provost (general services). He chairs the president's advisory committee on design, which is responsible for making judgements about the design of campus buildings.
Last Thursday and Friday, Elliott and his committee were interviewing ten architects, chosen from among the 30 applicants, and preparing a shortlist of four or five of them who will be asked to take part in a competition.
"It just seems to make sense," Elliott said, to go through a full-scale competition for a project this large and important. Design competitions were also held for the Davis Centre and, more recently, for the new Student Centre.
Initial thinking about the building involved a six-storey box on parking lot B1, but most people involved with the project are now suggesting that a serious piece of creative design is needed. "I dont want to see another ordinary piece of architecture on this campus," says Greenhouse.
It's a difficult site, surrounded on three sides by existing brick buildings that date from the 1960s and 1970s, and on the fourth side adjacent to the hypermodern glass Davis Centre. But as one of the largest buildings on the central campus, it does have the potential to be a landmark, even if it doesn't end up being six storeys high (as tall as the Math and Computer building).
A new overall 'Provost's Advisory Committee' for the ESE centre has been created, chaired by Dr. Robin Banks, associate provost (academic affairs), which is managing the project as a whole.
Its other members include Greenhouse, as chair of the user committee, Elliott; the deans of engineering and science, Dc David Bums and Dr. John Thompson; and Rudy Molinary, one of the triumvirate who head the plant operations department. Molinary was also project manager for the construction of the Davis Centre.
Greenhouse's user committee will also continue at work, "as at least the initial occupiers of the building", he says. But he notes that "you must build a building that can be adapted," and the exact units that move into it in 1998 might not be there decades later.
The faculty of science is getting three-quarters of the space and engineering one-quarter, he said. An alternative breakdown would show 50 per cent for earth sciences, 17 per cent for environmental and civil engineering, and 33 per cent for 'biotechnology', an area of study and research that spans both faculties.
Among the features he expects to see:
- Two large pilot plants (fermenters) for biotechnology research and development.
- A model water treatment plant.
- A 150- seat auditorium.
- Faculty offices.
- Student lounge space - "it's a research building, but it has also got to provide quality space for students." Altogether, the user committee has been working with an inventory of about 100 'units' of space that are needed, from single offices to large laboratories. "You can't ask the building to do everything," says Greenhouse, but you can ask it to start breaking down the old departmental boundaries that exist." Groundwater and biotechnoloqy specialists at UW come not only from earth sciences but from such other units as chemical engineering, chemistry and civil engineering.
The Biology and Earth Sciences Museum is expected to find a new and enlarged home, "front and centre" in the new building.
(UW
Gazette,
February
15,
1995)