Today I had the opportunity to take a look inside the new engineering building going up on St. George St on the University of Toronto campus. It is called the Centre for Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or CEIE. It will provide office space for many institutes within engineering. Additionally, the first four floors are student centred, and are given over to interactive classrooms, design spaces, and a light fabrication facility. The pouring of the concrete should be done by the end of May, and the building will be more or less done in January 2018. However, it will probably be next September before classes are run in most of the new spaces.
We took this construction elevator up to the sixth floor.
From there it was a climb up some stairs to get to the top (eight) floor.
Here we are on the 8th floor.
It is with the leadership and vision of Dean Cristina Amon that this building came into existence.
It’s that time of year when they fence off front campus so that by the time convocation rolls around, the grass will actually look decent.
I guess you have to be an architect or a constructor worker to really make the “safety vest and helmet” look work. The rest of us looked a bit like Michael Dukakis.
Another panorama.
They are still pouring the last of the concrete.
Temporary trusses provide the support for a concrete slab to be poured as the roof of the 8th floor. On top of this there will be a “penthouse” for ventilation equipment.
Now back down to the 6th floor.
The Hatchery is an undergraduate focused start up incubator that will be moved onto the sixth floor. Joseph, Hatchery director, is all smiles as he checks out his future home.
The design of the building had to be substantially altered to satisfy the requirement that Convocation Hall still had to be visible from Russell Ave. Here is a reverse angle view of that street. At the end, you can see Spadina Circle, where the new Architecture building is almost complete.
Back down on the ground floor, you can see the wall of a large auditorium classroom to the left.
This is a 468 seat auditorium where all of the seats will be grouped around small tables. Here, Prof. Stickel is taking a panorama. Many first year classes will be in this space.
I’m most interested in this space in the basement, called the arena. It will be a shared space for all the student design teams.
Celebrating with a bit of champagne and pizza. You can see the sloped underside of the tiered seating in the auditorium in the background.
Here is a cross sectional drawing of the whole building.
Can hardly wait to see the project complete.
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