Location: Offsite - buses and meeting spot, Parker Building, Laurentian Main campus

Please report 15 minutes prior to your scheduled departure to the OAA Dispatch Hub located next to Registration in the R.D. Parker Building

1.5 ConEd Learning Hours
1.5 AIA LU
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.

The McEwen School of Architecture (MSoA) provides several opportunities for learning about building environmental performance. The project incorporates and repurposes two existing railway industry buildings. One now accommodates faculty offices, meeting space, the university radio station, and a restaurant. The other has been refurbished as a wood workshop for learning about hand, machine, and digital fabrication.

Mass timber, including cross-laminated timber (CLT) and laminated wood beams, comprise the library, classroom, and lecture hall wing of the project. The studio wing is designed to harvest solar energy to heat interior floor slabs and contribute to displacement ventilation through the open concept.

The project interior is supplied with continuous fresh air. The heating/cooling system uses variable refrigerant flow technology drawing on air source heat pumps. A planted roof over the library wing provides for local bird habitat. The site was reforested with a selection of species that reflect the pre-industrial era of the Sudbury area landscape.

The design of the entire campus is thus pedagogical, allowing for constant opportunities for students and instructors to engage with various technologies in structure and performance. The open terracing of the studio spaces are enlivened with students' constant design activity and engagement with the building through various installations for courses or extra curricular activities.

Learning Objectives
1. Understand building energy systems designed to demonstrate low energy use with variable refrigerant flow technology.
2. Learn about the use of mass timber as means to reducing building carbon footprint.
3. Understand passive survival approach to building design in a northern community by integrating heating and envelope systems.
4. Hear about the adaptive reuse of the former Telegraph Building and a former railside warehouse into the overall project to conserve energy and materials.

Ted Wilson, OAA, LEED AP, is an architect and master lecturer at the McEwen School of Architecture at Laurentian University, focusing on building environmental performance. He is the Senior Vice President & Treasurer of the OAA. He and his partner Deborah are renovating a heritage home in Haute-Ville just north of the MSoA; they have reduced energy use at the house by 90 per cent. Ted and Deborah also have a daughter enrolled in the M.Arch program who is also working in a co-op placement at an architectural practice in downtown Sudbury.

Dr. Tammy Gaber is the director and an associate professor at the McEwen School of Architecture, where she teaches architecture design and theory courses. Tammy previously taught at University of Waterloo, American University in Cairo, and the British University in Egypt. She completed an SSHRC-funded research project that led to her forthcoming book, Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque Design and has published on gender and architecture with a chapter in the forthcoming Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture.
Tammy has also published chapters on vernacular and regional architecture in Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet and Diversity and Design: Perspectives from the Non-Western World, and has two chapters in the forthcoming The Religious Architecture of Islam. In 2019, she won the Women Who Inspire Award from the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, and was awarded Laurentian University’s Teaching Excellence Award for a Full-time Professor the following year. She was awarded SSHRC funding in 2022 for her research on the sacred spaces designed by the Modernist architects, Alvar, Aino, and Elissa Aalto.