August 4, 2008

Green Building

Fort Edmonton Park’s Welcome Centre aims for LEED Gold

STEPHEN DAFOE

correspondent

Long known for its view of the past, Edmonton’s historic Fort Edmonton Park now has its eyes set on the future, as it prepares to greet visitors with a new, green Welcome Centre.

The $4.6 million project, which received $1 million in funding from the Canada-Alberta Municipal Rural Infrastructure Fund (CAMRIF) in July, will see the creation of the City of Edmonton’s second environmentally friendly facility built to LEED Gold certification standards.

Anthony K. Eng Architect Limited of Edmonton was awarded the contract to design the one-and-a-half storey, 19,000-square-foot building, which will provide space for the park’s administration staff, meeting rooms, a gift shop and admissions gate.

The project, slated to begin construction this fall, will incorporate a number of green building features, including efficient heating and ventilation systems, low flush toilets, energy-efficient lighting and a building envelope designed to capture more natural light.

“The architect’s taken a lot of care and put a lot of attention into designing the building so that we get a lot of natural light penetrating into the building,” said Jack Ashton, project manager for the City of Edmonton.

Ashton said that further energy savings will be realized through the use of motion-activated lighting that turns on and off as people enter and exit rooms.

Additionally, the facility has been designed to include operable windows to provide passive air flow throughout the building, reducing the cooling load on mechanical systems in the summer months.

But what makes the project unique from other administration buildings in the city are the things that visitors may not see — at least at first glance.

Ashton explained that the new building will use a vertical field geothermal heating and cooling system, which will sink to a depth of about 300 feet (91.4 metres).

Additional insulation will be provided by setting the building into the side of a berm (creating an earth-sheltered building mass) and topping the structure off with a green roof.

Ashton explained that more than 60 per cent of the roof’s area will be green to help control temperature within the structure.

“There’s a thing called the albeto effect, where the light comes down and hits the roof and bounces off. It causes a lot of temperature variation in the building,” he said. “The green roof will help to mediate that to a certain degree and help keep the building cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.”

The green roof will provide more than insulation for the project.

“We’re going to be using a lot of native vegetation, so we’re not going to require an irrigation system on the roof,” Ashton said. “When you have that type of system, the water comes into the green roof and is pretty much stored within the green roof and utilized by the plants.”

In addition to controlling rooftop rainwater, the facility’s parking lot will consist of gravel rather than the traditional asphalt, allowing rain to be absorbed into the water table rather than into local storm sewers.

The building process itself will include green features.

Construction waste will be separated into bins and taken to recycling centres.

The project was awarded to Edmonton-based PCL Construction Management Inc. The company plans to break ground in mid-September, as the park winds down for the season.

Edmonton will be seeing plenty more green in the future, and not just from the province’s booming oil and gas industry. Last summer, the city championed the green building trend by issuing a policy which states that all future municipal buildings must be built to at least the LEED Silver standard.

The Fort Edmonton Park project is the city’s second project to strive for LEED Gold. In 2007, the Edmonton Police Services’ South East Division Station became the city’s first LEED Gold-compliant project and the first police station in North America to achieve the standard.

Edmonton currently has an additional seven LEED registered projects underway. Three of these are currently under construction, including the Lois Hole Library, the Southwest Transit Garage and the Southwest Community Recreation Centre.

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