November 19, 2009

DIAMOND + SCHMITT

The project is being funded in large part with infrastructure stimulus dollars.

Education infrastructure

Queen’s University School of Medicine getting new $77 million home

PATRICIA WILLIAMS

staff writer

Kingston’s M. Sullivan & Son Ltd. is building a new home for the Queen’s University School of Medicine. Scheduled to open in 2011, the $77 million facility will consolidate teaching, research, administrative and student facilities in one location.

Currently, classrooms and labs are housed in cramped and aged facilities scattered across campus.

Ground was recently broken on the 100,000-square-foot, four-storey building located on a prominent site on the southeast corner of the campus.

More than $57.6 million in funding is being provided under the federal Knowledge Infrastructure Program and Ontario’s 2009 budget.

M. Sullivan vice-president Greg Sullivan said the key challenge will be meeting the March 2011 deadline for completion, as is the case with other projects being funded under the stimulus program.

His company, which has been working on the Queen’s campus since 1949, is acting as construction manager on the medical school. A site works contract has been awarded to LEN Corcoran Excavating Ltd.

The concrete formwork contract is expected to be tendered in the next couple of weeks.

Designed by Diamond + Schmitt Architects in joint venture with J.V. Shoalts and Zaback Architects, the building will house:

• A clinical teaching centre where patients, students and physicians will work in a clinical environment within an educational setting;

• Three large teaching venues and classrooms designed to promote interactive and long-distance learning;

• A patient simulation lab for the monitoring and review of controlled medical events;

• A 3,600-square-foot surgical skills lab where students, long-time physicians, paramedics, nurses and other health care workers can acquire, maintain and hone their skills;

• Thirty small group rooms and an information commons/virtual library with a number of student group and private study areas.

The school will be clad in limestone, the traditional building material used at Queen’s since the 1840s. Inside, however, the facility will depart from tradition, said architect Donald Schmitt.

“The classrooms, labs and study rooms have been designed to enhance today’s innovative teaching practices and promote interactive learning using the most sophisticated electronic teaching technologies available,” he said.

Schmitt said the design of the building inside and out is commensurate “with the pedagogic excellence” of the medical school itself.

The project is being undertaken by a team that includes structural engineers Rooney Engineering Ltd., mechanical and electrical engineers H.H. Angus and Associates Ltd., landscape architects DuToit Allsopp Hillier and civil engineers Josselyn Engineering Inc.

“When completed, Queen’s will have a world-class training facility that will continue to attract the best medical students and faculty and provide an unparalleled educational experience for the doctors of tomorrow,” said David Walker, dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences.

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