A New Home for ETFO

Gene Lewis — ETFO Gen­eral Secretary

This month work will begin on a project that has been in devel­op­ment for sev­eral years. Demo­li­tion crews will begin tear­ing down an old build­ing to make way for a new home for ETFO.

ETFO’s new home will be green, beau­ti­ful, and cost effi­cient. The new build­ing has been designed to achieve LEED cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. LEED – Lead­er­ship in Energy & Envi­ron­men­tal Design – is an inter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized bench­mark for green build­ing con­struc­tion and oper­a­tion. LEED cer­ti­fi­ca­tion rec­og­nizes that a build­ing has been con­structed to and will be oper­ated on high envi­ron­men­tal stan­dards. The new ETFO head­quar­ters is designed to achieve the LEED plat­inum certification—the high­est achiev­able standard.

The archi­tects of ETFO’s new home, Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blum­berg (KPMB), are award win­ning archi­tects. Among their projects are Koerner Hall at the Royal Con­ser­va­tory of Music, the TIFF Bell Light­box, the Art Gallery of Hamil­ton, the Cana­dian Museum of Nature, and the soon-to-be-completed Bal­sil­lie Cam­pus at the Uni­ver­sity of Water­loo. KPMB also designed Man­i­toba Hydro Place in Win­nipeg, a highly energy-efficient build­ing that has become a must-see des­ti­na­tion for vis­i­tors to the city.

In a Decem­ber 2009 arti­cle in the Toronto Star, archi­tec­ture critic Christo­pher Hume called Man­i­toba Hydro Place Canada’s only truly impor­tant build­ing. “This is the first large office tower in Canada to deal seri­ously with the com­plex­i­ties of the 21^st cen­tury,” Hume wrote. “This is a build­ing that recasts cor­po­rate head­quar­ters as a light-filled space shared equally by all employ­ees. Unlike the energy-hog work­places to which most Cana­di­ans are con­signed, this one heats, cools and pro­vides fresh air at a frac­tion of the usual cost.”

ETFO’s build­ing will fol­low in the foot­steps of Man­i­toba Hydro Place. Although much smaller in size, it will incor­po­rate some of the same desir­able green fea­tures. The build­ing uti­lizes proven sus­tain­able build­ing tech­nolo­gies through­out, includ­ing auto­mated exte­rior shad­ing, radi­ant heat­ing and cool­ing ceil­ing sys­tems, under­floor or “dis­place­ment” air deliv­ery, geot­her­mal fields, exhaust air heat recov­ery, rain­wa­ter har­vest­ing, nat­ural ven­ti­la­tion, auto­mated light­ing sys­tems, and an exten­sive green roof area.

Accord­ing to its archi­tects, ETFO’s build­ing will “set a new prece­dent in Canada for a sen­si­tively inte­grated, low-rise, and highly sus­tain­able office build­ing.” It is sized to “inte­grate effec­tively into its mixed-use neigh­bour­hood.” Fully flex­i­ble and acces­si­ble con­fer­ence facil­i­ties on the ground floor serve as a wel­com­ing new home to mem­bers from across the province, ensur­ing that the new build­ing will meet the needs of ETFO for years to come.

Our new build­ing will be a prac­ti­cal demon­stra­tion of sus­tain­able build­ing con­struc­tion and oper­a­tion, a “build­ing that leads” in the words of archi­tect Bruce Kuwabara. It will be a fit­ting home for a fed­er­a­tion that leads.