Broken ground

October 16, 2009

By Mark Ferguson and Colleen MacPherson

The university broke ground Oct. 13 on E Wing, the next component of the Academic Health Sciences project.

Rob Norris, Saskatchewan minister of advanced education, employment and labour, said the tender for the project came in several million dollars less than expected thanks to an increasingly competitive construction industry and sound financial management by the U of S. Norris announced PCL Construction was awarded the $83.5 million contract for E Wing.

In his remarks during the ground-breaking ceremony, U of S President Peter MacKinnon said E Wing and the entire Academic Health Sciences centre will be a facility focused on students, interdisciplinary and interprofessional teaching and research, and distributed learning.

“This is a wonderful investment by the province” that will benefit health care for Saskatchewan people, said MacKinnon. “It’s ambitious, and the university will live up to it.”

After the public groundbreaking event held outside the Medical Research Building, Richard Florizone, vice-president of finance and resources, noted the total estimated cost for E Wing, which includes the PCL contract, landscaping, infrastructure, and site development, is $121.3 million. He added the target budgets for specific components of Academic Health Sciences that have not been tendered would not be made public to protect the university’s competitive position in future tendering processes. Maintaining the confidentiality of project budgets ensures the university receives competitive bids for projects, he explained.

According to Ron Cruikshank, director of projects and engineering with the Facilities Management Division (FMD), construction will begin immediately with the building scheduled to be completed by October 2012. Commissioning, outfitting the space and moving occupants will take a bit more time and he expects the building will be fully operational by the start of the 2013 fall term.

The construction schedule starts with the deconstruction of the Medical Research Building and the existing underground MRI facility connected to Royal University Hospital (RUH), said Cruikshank. The fieldstone, red granite and tyndall stone on the research building will be recycled and used in construction of E Wing. The building’s concrete will be crushed and used as aggregate in roadwork on campus. It is a time-consuming process, he said “and the cost of demolition goes up but the cost of installation goes down because you already have the materials.”

The new wing will be 24,000 square meters over four storeys with one level of underground parking for about 100 stalls for patients and the public. If the timing is right, said Cruikshank, there could be four tower cranes at work on campus at one time – two on the new E Wing, one on D Wing and another on the Place Riel expansion.

The building will be connected to the College of Dentistry building, A Wing of Academic Health Sciences and RUH via an atrium. Inside will be housed a 500-seat lecture theatre, the largest on campus, along with a small teaching theatre. The Health Sciences Library will take up two floors and the Clinical Learning Resource Centre will include 24 examination rooms. The Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture will move from RUH into the new facility, joining the Saskatchewan Drug Information Service in the space.

The building will include over 150 offices and research spaces for faculty from the Colleges of Nursing, Pharmacy and Nutrition, and Medicine, as well as the Schools of Physical Therapy and Public Health.