A Tour of the New Building

April 15, 2005

Like everybody in our Department, I followed the construction of the new building with great interest, and looked forward leaving behind the stark, cramped workspace we occupied to that point. We watched them tear down the middle-aged Engineering building and prepare the site almost two years before we were allowed in to see how the construction was progressing. These pictures document the state of the building as of April 15, 2005. The tour begins outside.

The north side faces University Centre - the horizonal line of windows on this side are some of our faculty offices, and the floor above on this side is our laboratories

The east side has more of our offices on the 4th and 5th floors

A broader view showing more of the site

The construction site outside the east entry

Hard Hat Zone

The east entry into the building

The outside entry on the east side is a small atrium that looks up the side of the new building. You bend around the right at the end, and see the main level consisting mainly of classrooms and engineering labs. From there, the basement level also contains numerous classrooms and a tunnel to University Centre.

One of the engineering areas on the main floor

The basement tunnel to UC

Corridor in the basement

One of the basement classrooms

...and another one

The stairs from the basement level leading up into the atrium

The atrium is interesting, its rare here to have a nice open indoor space. Past planning being what it was, there's also a range of architectural styles in the engineering buildings to try to bring together here, but I think it will work. We're stuck with it either way :)

The basement stairway looking up to what will be a glassed in wall

The space between what used to be the newest engineering building and the oldest

Looking up

a stitched panorama from the basement level - the new building is on the left, the oldest building on the right

Another pan from the main level. The new building seems to reflect a lot of light from the upper windows down into the atrium

One wall of the atrium is entirely the old external wall of the next-to-newest engineering building. On that surface they've mounted four large ventilation pipes. Since the adjaced wall is half limestone (the next-to-newest building) and half steel (the new building), the visual effect of these pipes seem to be an effort to tie the disparate spaces together.

Lower portion of pipes

Upper portion of pipes and atrium windows

These two stitched panoramas basically show the whole space

Entering back into the building, we go up the side stairwell to the top floor

hallway on 2nd floor

View inside top floor stairwell on east side

Looking left

Looking right

Going back inside, we can see the atrium from the top

Grad student area on the 5th floor, overlooking the atrium to the right

View back across the rest of the building

Looking down into the atrium (with steel-toed boot)

Looking down toward the glass wall

On the main staircase looking down

Those big pipes again

I also managed to get a few pictures of office areas to get an idea of what these will look like

One of our east-facing offices, showing windows

Office floor space - you can see the door has a large window beside it opening into the hallway

From a little way back, looking at the offices through the rooms across from them and the hallway

Reasonably wide corridor in front of offices

Another office (one of the few 5th floor ones)

4th floor office

And finally a few miscellaneous images

View down into the atrium from the 4th floor

Main 4th floor hallway

View to the north from research labs (our offices on this side are a level below this)

One of the larger research labs

I also took a couple of movie clips (these are unfortunately rather dark and choppy, as my digital camera doesn't adapt well to light changes while in movie mode): Atrium1 Atrium2 Sample Faculty Office