RC107 JulyAugust2023 - Magazine - Page 18
BUILDINGS
Top to Bottom: The new
UTSC student residence
will house 746 first-year
students and offer a
combination of single,
double, and accessible
suites. Looking for ways
to reduce heating and
cooling costs, UTSC
implemented many
sustainable technologies
into its new residence.
mixed-use spaces. The university is also planning to add a
rooftop garden and terrace to the new residence.
“Our first-year students will be living in this residence.
There are common spaces in each wing and lounge spaces
on each floor, and then there’s a common cafeteria where
the whole community can come together. We haven’t
been able to offer this kind of residence for our students
before,” Arifuzzaman says. “Now, everybody is clustered,
where first-year students are together, while building
academic communities. Students will be living on a floor
that has students in different programs living and learning
together. It’s going to create a whole first-year community
feel that has been lacking on the campus.”
Passive House power
While designing the new residence, university officials
identified that many of the basic principles around how to
build an efficient building have been usurped by technology,
“We just add better or more efficient heating systems
or more efficient air conditioning systems, and it’s all
technology based,” explains Arifuzzaman. “But at the
same time, we had an ice storm in Toronto about 10 years
ago, and we lost all power on campus for three or four
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Passive House construction
The construction of the new residence was performed by
Pomerleau, one of Canada’s largest construction firms.
The company was awarded the design-bridge-build contract to help achieve the sustainable architectural design
and energy efficiency standards required for Passive
House Certification. The timing of the contract created
several hurdles for the general contractor to overcome.
“We submitted our bid in November 2019, and then
we were negotiating the contract in March of 2020, and
then the pandemic hit,” explains Michael Faustini, project
director for Pomerleau. “Navigating a pandemic was a
first for us. So, we had to solve a lot of contractual uncertainty, but we were able to overcome that. And I think
that was the first step towards a good relationship with
the university.”
Building the new residence to Passive House Standards
was an absolute must for the university.
“It was non-negotiable for them,” Faustini says. “They
had spent so much time and investment in understanding
Passive House, what it entailed, designing for it, that they
didn’t want to let that go, it was important to them. That
just speaks to their commitment for not just sustainability—because that’s a buzzword—but in their case, I think
they know that if the university or the institutions don’t
do it first, the private sector is likely not going to be the
ones to do it first. And so, they have to be the leaders and
bring down costs that way.”
Building the first building of this size to Passive House
Standards required a significant learning curve.
RENEWCANADA.NET
POMERLEAU
days. And because they had prioritized the hospitals
and nursing homes, we couldn’t get diesel deliveries. We
had students living on campus and we couldn’t heat or
cool their spaces in an effective way. So, we thought that
maybe Passive House was an approach to take, where
you’re taking dollars out of the mechanical systems and
investing them in the envelope of the building.”
Arifuzzaman says no developer has built a building
using Passive House technologies at this scale in this kind
of environment in Toronto. The university hopes that by
producing a passive house residence at this scale, developers will see the benefits of this type of construction.
“If I’m a condo developer, I’m not taking the risk of
building the first passive house, because there’s risk for
how it gets built, what the supply chain looks like, and
are there qualified people to build the building?” Arifuzzaman says. “We thought, as a university, that’s something that we can de-risk for the market. By building at
this scale, take on some of those risks… we could begin to
change the industry.”
UTSC also hopes that offering this type of residence
experience to first-year students will help them see the
value of Passive House standards when it comes time for
them to purchase their first homes.
“Now we will have 746 people a year who are going to
be living in a passive house. In the span of a decade, there
will be approximately 7,500 people who will be putting
pressure on developers to build more viable Passive
Houses. And we’ve kind of de-risked the marketplace for
some of those developers,” Arifuzzaman says.
