Structural steel core to Goldring’s strength

While the design of many of Toronto’s recent sporting facility projects relies primarily on the structural strength of reinforced concrete, the University of Toronto’s Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport will rely on 12,000 tonnes of structural steel.

The building was designed in a joint venture by Patkau Architects of Vancouver and by MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects (MJM) of Toronto, winners of an international design competition for the $58-million project, which broke ground in January 2013. The design-build project is being undertaken by EllisDon. The steel is being fabricated and erected by Walters Inc.

The centre is named after the late Warren Goldring, who graduated from the U of T in 1949. The Goldring family provided an $11-million gift to establish the centre. The Ontario government will supply $22.5 million in funding. The four-storey facility will be part of the Varsity Centre athletic facilities campus, the fourth and final phase of a $98-million Varsity renewal program. It will house research and teaching labs, a training centre, expanded facilities for the U of T Sports Medicine Clinic and a column-free “fieldhouse”— a competition-level basketball court offering seating for 2,000 spectators.

“Structural steel framing was chosen for this project because no other structural system that we are aware of could have been used in this application,” says Aaron Letki, an architect with MJM. “In order to keep the below-grade basketball court free of columns and obstructions, individual pieces of steel were assembled into trusses that span the 50-metre length of the fieldhouse between the fourth floor and the roof.”

The second and third storeys are suspended from the trusses above using large diameter threaded-steel hangers.

“In fact, tension is an easier force to design and build with than compression, since buckling does not have to be considered,” says Letki. “The floor system is traditional steel, and between those steel beams we have precast concrete slabs to form the flooring.”

The project site is located just south of Bloor Street, on Devonshire Place, across the street from Varsity Stadium to the east. The north end of Devonshire Place has been closed to traffic during construction as construction vehicles ply the narrow street, which is also being used as a material staging yard.

Rather than build the 55-metre-long steel trusses member by member, each truss was delivered in sections and assembled in the staging area.

“There is very little staging area at the site,” says Letki. “Trusses were constructed in thirds on the fieldhouse floor which is 10 metres below grade. On completion, each section was hoisted out of the pit and stacked in the limited space available at grade.”

Upon completion of all of the truss sections, a 500-tonne telescoping boom crane, the largest in the province, was brought to the site to erect the truss sections.

“Walters erected temporary yellow steel shoring towers designed to support the assembled trusses temporarily until they could be bolted together,” says Letki. “The steel trusses were hoisted into position by crane over six days. Once the assembled steel trusses became self-supporting, the towers were removed.”

The exterior of the building will feature large glass cut-outs that will highlight the structural steel. It will also feature lightweight steel and aluminum cladding designed to reduce additional dead loads on the building.

The centre is scheduled for completion in January 2015. The court is already booked to play host to competitions at the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games, including futsal, an indoor variant of soccer.