GORDON BELL HIGH SCHOOL DEEP ENERGY RETROFIT + ENVELOPE RECONSTRUCTION
Winnipeg, Manitoba
PUBLIC CITY served as Prime Consultant for this large scale building envelope and mechanical systems upgrades project to Gordon Bell High School, leading an interdisciplinary team of architectural, landscape architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, and building envelope consultants. The project was designed as a 2 year phased construction, encompassing the entire 154,000 sf building’s three-storey, five-wing wall envelope, 50% of the building’s roof envelope, and the entire building’s heating and ventilation systems. This project is the largest school envelope retrofit undertaken by the Province of Manitoba as a single project, and combined with the mechanical systems upgrades, it is one of the largest school renovation projects on the provincial capital projects list.
The renovation is complex and involves a wide range of of construction types, building vintages, and building intersections, which the design seeks to stitch together with a rhythmic combination of colourful punched windows set within a monolithic GFRC cladding system at the upper storeys, all of which is set on top of a stone masonry base. Gordon Bell is an urban school in a densely and ethnically diverse populated area of the city, and it is situated prominently on the Trans-Canada Highway’s route through the city of Winnipeg. The project is involved in a National Research Council of Canada (NRCan) research grant, associated with deep energy retrofits and a team of the Province’s energy experts, and Red River College’s Building Efficiency Technology Access Centre (BETAC).
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