The new Skilled Trades and Technology Centre (STTC) on the Notre Dame campus of Red River College (RRC) in Winnipeg is a training center for more than 1,000 students in high-demand fields of employment.
But its outside shows something pretty unique. It resembles the viewer using a piece of creativity, the timber that covers a part of Manitoba.
Inspiration for the exterior becomes a birch woodland, stated Doug Hanna, an architect with Number TEN Architectural Group in Winnipeg and the main person in charge of the project.
“The reputedly random patterns of black, white, and wooden-colored aluminum panels and home windows have been inspired by using the visible cues from a birch forest and were achieved to create a non-institutional feel and make a greater casual and inviting environment for college students,” stated Hanna.
The outside of the STTC is a focus of RRC’s Notre Dame campus, located about five miles northwest of downtown Winnipeg.
Work on the 2-storey, 104,000-square-foot construction began in August 2015 and finished in July 2018, in time for training in September.
The building is oriented around a skylit central galleria that serves as a pedestrian street near football fields.
It is flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook each of the workshops.
“Every workshop and classroom has sizeable glazing into the galleria to inspire transparency, collaboration, and sharing of information,” stated Hanna. “Think of it as a shopping center of training for the trades.”
Several applications had been moved from the present buildings at the RRC campus into the STTC: electric, sheet metal, refrigeration, and carpentry.
Manufacturing and aerospace are placed within the 6,000-square-foot Smart Factory, part of the new center.
The Smart Factory will incorporate such rising technologies as robotics, automation, additive production, high-speed robotic inspection, and commercial networking.
“The present buildings have been constructed in the past due Sixties and early 1970s and have been beyond the age at which they might be efficiently retrofitted,” said Patrick Kuzyk, RRC’s chief capital initiatives officer.
The project was designed with the aid of Number TEN, the prime specialists on the challenge, with Pico Architecture, which became called Ager Little Architects Inc., whilst it took place at the STTC assignment.
“We cut up the design levels 50/50 with Number TEN,” said Gail Little, principal of Pico. “During the layout stages, we had two senior architects from every agency in every layout assembly. Number TEN took a leading role in the detailing of the development documentation section, and we led the gadget coordination and format.”
Little said two of Pico’s architects within the STTC mission had also been worried about a comparable construction at Assiniboine Community College in Brandon, Man.
