August 4, 2010

TOWN OF AMHERSTBURG

The Amherstburg recreation complex is now under construction.

Amherstburg, Ontario builds inclusive recreation centre

RON STANG

correspondent

WINDSOR, Ont.

For Max De Angelis, owner and president of De Angelis Construction Inc., building the town of Amherstburg’s new recreation complex is something that hits home personally.

“I grew up here, my folks live here, my niece and nephew live here,” he said. “I’ve spent a lot of years in this community and there’s a lot of unique features that will separate this facility from a lot of others in Ontario so I’m quite proud of it.”

Indeed, project officials believe the Amherstburg multi-use recreation complex will be the most “inclusive” of its kind in Canada.

The sportsplex will be home to Canada’s first Miracle League Baseball Diamond. This is a synthetic turf field that can accommodate wheelchairs and walking devices and has a rubberized surface. The sportsplex will also be able to accommodate sledge hockey players or those with disabilities. And spectator areas have been designed so that people in wheelchairs can easily be located in the same areas as others and not be confined to a segregated zone, say, at the end of the rink.

The $24 million sportsplex, which will open in December (though ball diamonds will be in use this summer), is funded through federal and provincial grants. Amherstburg — population 22,000 — is putting up almost $8 million.

“We’ve gone outside of the normal way of thinking and we’ve made these buildings fully accessible,” De Angelis said.

De Angelis is the local face — and played an integral role — in the trio of companies that won the design-build contract. De Angelis’s 42-year portfolio has been mostly constructing smaller commercial and institutional buildings like schools, fitness centres and retail chain stores.

Joining it are two companies with much experience in sports facility construction. One is Norlon Builders of London Ltd. whose projects include the TD Waterhouse Stadium at University of Western Ontario and the St. Mary’s , Ont. arena and community centre. London’s Spriet Associates, which has an ownership stake in Norlon, has designed 45 arenas including the Stratford Rotary Arena Complex, Burlington Double Pad Arena, and Wayne Gretzky Centre ice pad addition in Brantford.

Amherstburg’s indoor building is almost 135,000 square feet. It has two ice pads, a practice mini rink, a soccer field with walking track, a 2,900 sq. ft. community room, and 2,100 sq. ft. for food concessions and sports retailing, the last aspect rather unique for a community building.

Outdoors, besides the Miracle League diamond, will be Ontario’s first community “premier” ball field built to professional sport standards, and southwestern Ontario’s first FIFA and CFL-sized soccer and football fields. All will have artificial turf.

The complex is built to LEED Silver certification.

Then there’s the glass.

Unusual for arenas, there will be a 180-foot series of five–foot-high windows.

These will reduce lighting costs as the polycarbonate glazing diffuses heat but lets in light.

“Normally when we design arenas we don’t want any windows in them,” Spriet associate architect and structural engineer Kevin McIlmurray says with a chuckle.

But this type of window, which also was used in St. Mary’s arena, won’t “affect the condition of the ice.”

Heating and cooling design will also save money and energy. Heat pumps and geothermal ground loops — a first for an arena in the Windsor-area — will exchange sub-surface ground heat during winter and pump out hot air during summer.

Ice-making will eliminate dangerous ammonia and re-distribute heat from the process to spectator areas. There will be solar panels on the roof feeding into the electrical grid.

The L-shaped building’s lobby, community room and retail area are conventionally designed and have the requisite features like rubber skate flooring. The rinks and indoor field were pre-engineered using open web steel joists and a flat roof.

“That’s basically because of economics,” McIlmurray says. “They’re less costly than long-spanned joists and the roof is a steel roof as opposed to a membrane roof.”

Windsor-based consulting engineer Rick Spencer of Hanna Ghobrial & Spencer Ltd., who oversaw the outdoor athletic field construction, said the fields didn’t necessarily pose a challenge, having a clear stone sub-drainage system to prevent storm water pooling. “That works very very well and is very porous.”

Design assistance was provided by the Miracle League of Michigan, which has pioneered the Miracle League sport in North America.

Spencer says pulling together all site features around a central traffic hub means people don’t have to walk great distances between athletic fields and the adjacent building.

“Instead of spreading them out in a north–south direction where you had all the space, we worked hard to come up with a site plan that would assist the inclusiveness.”

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