September 2, 2010

RON STANG

The front entrance of the Centre for Applied Transportation Technologies building.

Fanshawe College’s new Centre for Applied Transportation Technologies goes green

RON STANG

correspondent

LONDON, Ont.

Green building techniques and flexible spaces are the hallmarks of Fanshawe College’s new Centre for Applied Transportation Technologies (CATT) building.

The building, located about three blocks from the main campus in east London, ironically is being built over a badly contaminated brownfield site. At one time there was a nickel and chromium plating factory there.

“It was a site that had heavily contaminated soil,” said Jason McIntosh, architect and project manager with TRMI (Tillman Ruth Mocellin Inc.) in London.

“So the college has spent a lot of money to excavate and get rid of the contamination during construction.”

With government grants totalling $31.8 million, the striking swept-roof, glass-clad building is far removed from the current early-60s garages CATT has that date from when the college was the Ontario Vocational Centre.

It might just be the fanciest “shop” building in the country, where students will work on everything from small vehicle repair to heavy construction, from farm equipment to 18-wheelers.

“It is, I think, one of a kind right now with regards to how large it is and the equipment that they’re going to have in it,” McIntosh says.

Despite the building’s outward appearances, Fanshawe’s project co-ordinator Doug Calder wouldn’t describe the interior as open concept, though there are a lot of “larger flexible” areas.

“There’s potentially a 16-bay service garage in there. We have a heavy equipment shop, which is kind of a universal flexible shop space for them to run and do repairs on tractors or other type of equipment, and then we have an eight bay road truck repair shop at one end,” he says.

Inside and out, CATT will be one of the greenest such buildings. Though not built to LEED standards, the 100,000-square-foot centre is being constructed with a strong sense of the environment in mind. “We just wanted to say to the community that we were trying to do some incentives here to reduce our consumption of energy and impact on the environment,” says Calder.

There are vegetated green roofs using drought-resistant plants to keep the building cool in hot weather, maximize storm water retention and protect the roof membrane from the sun.

There are also solar-powered skylights that use GPS to track the sun’s position in the sky, adjusting reflectors to maximize the amount of natural light that falls into the shop, reducing the need for artificial light.

The building will also have daylight harvesting light controls and occupancy sensors to reduce light output when natural light is available or the rooms are unoccupied.

There will also be a stormwater reclamation system that collects rainwater in an underground storage tank and recycles it for toilet flushing and general site irrigation.

The blue smoky glass front curtain wall is comprised of energy-efficient windows that have argon gas and Low-E coatings. Also being built-in are energy-efficient mechanical systems including variable speed drives, solar hot water heating, and occupancy sensors to reduce the energy output when rooms are vacant.

Construction is taking place with numerous environmentally friendly building materials, including wall insulation, no or low VOC paints and polished concrete floors in the shops.

McIntosh says the GPS tracking is “pretty new — I think there are only a few projects in Ontario that have it. It’s being used in California, but it is a fairly new product to this region.”

The front glass entrance is under an overhanging roof that protects against direct light entering the building.

Inside is an open-concept staircase that surrounds the elevator shaft. “You get a perspective into the main foyer and corridor system”, Calder says.

The shops themselves will have polished concrete floors, “for improved thermal mass but also for the light reflectancy where we are using the skylights,” McIntosh says.

“Also, the nice benefit of the polished concrete floor is that it doesn’t need to be sealed so you’re not resealing it every year and dumping chemicals down the drain.”

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