One of the veterans of the School of Construction and the Environment at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) is Pilar Bonilla, who has been teaching there for more than 10 years.
During that time Bonilla has brought a fresh new approach to construction education at BCIT by incorporating her many and varied experiences in the industry as well as her ideas about how construction can benefit society.
A native of Colombia, Bonilla earned an engineering degree and a Master of Business Administration at the Universidad de los Andes (the University of The Andes) in Bogota, the country’s capital.
Needing more education and wanting a change of scenery, she relocated to Vancouver where she earned a masters degree in engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
“After graduating from UBC, I got a job,” said Bonilla. “I was employed as a construction operations manager and then construction manager at Polygon Homes, where I worked on multi-family residential construction projects in the Lower Mainland.”
After Polygon, she was employed by Mosaic Homes as a construction manager on multi-family residential and mixed-use projects.
While working at Mosaic, she began teaching part-time at BCIT.
“I really enjoyed BCIT,” she said. “The school feels like it’s part of the real world, not some ivory tower, and it employs teachers who teach from their real-world experience.”
In addition to teaching, Bonilla decided she wanted to apply what she had learned about the concept of sustainable and green construction while in the process of becoming a registered engineer.
So Bonilla started a company that specialized in the sustainable construction and remodelling of residential properties.
“I ran Urban Design Development and Construction for eight years,” she said. “I enjoyed being my own boss and the feeling of satisfaction that comes from creating good products and seeing my own work. I learned the importance of being brave and taking chances.”
Although she eventually wound down Urban Design, Bonilla didn’t lose her enthusiasm for green construction.
Now a full-time teacher at BCIT, she developed and teaches a course in sustainable construction called Introduction to Green Building Construction Practices, which has been going strong for more than eight years.
Topics of instruction include green building definition, guidelines, regulations and standards, as well as cost/benefit evaluation of green construction methods and rating systems.
Bonilla also wrote a module on ethics and sustainability in the school of construction’s basic management and ethics course.
The module she developed looks at basic ethical rights and principles and various industry codes of ethics.
On top of her course work at BCIT, Bonilla has for years taken an active part in extracurricular activities aimed at promoting sustainability in construction.
For example, she participated in BCIT’s Pacific Spirit Project, Canada’s first post-secondary training initiative to help educators learn how to include sustainability in their classroom instruction.
Bonilla is also the manager of BCIT’s Centre for Ecocities Youth Climate Changemaker’s initiative.
An ecocity is “a human settlement modelled on the self-sustaining resilient structure and function of natural ecosystems.” BCIT’s is the world’s first such centre.
In partnership with UN-Habitat and the UN Environment Program, the centre delivers international workshops in Climate Change Makers Youth Leadership Training.
The purpose of the training is to give the young and environmentally-engaged the skills and knowledge “to increase their capacity to influence positive change in their communities and unpack and promote a carbon-neutral ‘one planet’ lifestyle.”
In addition to upping its sustainability game, Bonilla says the construction industry needs to become more efficient and up-to-date by making more use of such new technologies as robotics.
“Greater effort should also go into making the workforce more diversified,” said Bonilla. “New and different groups of workers bring in different ideas and fresh perspectives. For example, women have a different approach to construction than men. Women are less impulsive and pay more attention to safety.”
To bring new groups into construction, some obstacles will have to be cleared out of the way first.
“Historically, construction has been a line of work that young people got into as a last resort, so there was a stigma attached to it and there still is,” said Bonilla. “However, these days to be in construction you need to be educated and you need to have skills and be able to deploy them. Construction is certainly not for dummies.”
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