UWaterloo approves new buildings.

Green roofs figure in new buildings - UWaterloo Daily Bulletin 06.04.06

UW's Board of Governors gave approval Tuesday to progress on four planned buildings. Here's a roundup:
Approval was given to "the conceptual design" for what's now being called the Quantum-Nano Centre. It's a big building -- about 250,000 square feet, almost as big as the Davis Centre -- to be shared by the nanotechnology engineering program and the Institute for Quantum Computing. The official construction budget is $70 million, although provost Amit Chakma told the board it's becoming clear that that won't be enough. "We'll come back to you with a business plan," he promised.

The building is going on a site north of Biology II, and will be linked at upper levels to both that building and Math and Computer. There will still be outdoor pathways at ground level on both sides of the building. It's to be five stories high, and organized as two main pieces: a narrow east-west block on the north side, mostly for IQC, and a squarish southern piece, mostly for nano.

It'll be "the most sophisticated building ever built on campus", said vice-president (administration and finance) Dennis Huber. Among its features: two atriums, a "green" roof, a cantilevered wing pointing toward the ring road (as pictured above), and main entrances for IQC (on the ring road side) and nano (facing Chemistry II).

The board approved almost $8 million in construction contracts for early work on the School of Pharmacy building in downtown Kitchener -- ranging from $175,000 for paving to $4.4 million for concrete formwork. Total construction budget for that project is $34 million.

The board also got a progress report on the complicated legal transaction that's moving ownership of the land, at King and Victoria Streets, from its present owner -- heirs of the defunct Epton plant -- to the city of Kitchener, and from the city to UW. Consulting engineers will need to review the most recent findings about pollutants on the property, and give their okay, before construction work can start, a report from the building and properties committee told the board.

Approval was given to build an addition to the PAS (Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology) building to house graduate student offices. The estimated cost: $4 million, which the faculty of arts will find from its operating budget. Such space is desperately needed if the arts faculty is to expand its enrolment at the graduate level, dean Bob Kerton said.

The wing will be attached to PAS pointing north, towards Environmental Studies II and behind the Humanities building. The board gave approval for hiring an architectural and engineering consultant to work on the project, and was told that it will review the animal facilities on the ground floor of PAS at the same time.

Finally, the board approved the "conceptual design" for the School of Accountancy wing that will be added to Hagey Hall of the Humanities pointing toward the Tatham Centre. That project is budgeted at $10 million, about half of it coming from Campaign Waterloo fund-raising and half from revenue that the accounting school will receive from higher-than-average tuition fees.

Planned is a three-storey building with "a significant number of classrooms" as well as offices and "a partial green roof". A tentative floor plan shows a 200-seat amphitheatre as well as smaller lecture halls, and entrances facing north, south, east and west to encourage "pedestrian movement around and through the building".