Steel truss the heart of Waterloo’s E3

A unique steel truss design is at the heart of Environment 3, the newest building at the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment. The building has garnered LEED Platinum status.

More bridge than a building, the structure “flies” over the top of the Environment 2 building through the use of extremely large trusses which provide rigidity and support.

“Most buildings have their structural steel inside where you don’t see it,” said Nigel Thompson, structural engineer at designers WalterFedy which worked with Akitt Swanson & Pearce Architects and Cooper Construction.

“In this case, it’s seen outside and you can see the trusses from the outside and the inside, though they are painted over inside.”

At the end of the day, he said: “They’re just very big trusses. A truss is a truss.” Still, he admits to more than a thrill when he looks at the project, certainly when it was being erected into place as one giant piece.

“It’s unique and I don’t know if I’ll ever be involved in anything like it again,” he said. “It is nice to drive by and know I had a small part in building it.”

The innovative steel design won WalterFedy an Award of Excellence at the 22nd Annual Canadian Institute of Steel Construction (CISC) Awards last year. Some 88 per cent of the steel used was from recycled materials.

It’s just one of several accolades the unique building has garnered among them being the first university in Canada to nail a LEED platinum.

Features include a two-storey living wall in the atrium, incorporation of sustainable wood products, and use of automatic, low-flow faucets and low-flush toilets and urinals fed by roof-captured rainwater.

The building also features unique honeycomb design windows for maximum R value fitted with sensors for shading which maximize daylight.

All told, the building consumes 45 per cent less energy than a standard building of its size with some of the energy coming from a rooftop solar array generating up to 67,000 kWh/year. The facility uses 87 per cent less water.

All this is made possible by the unique steel truss design which also serves to minimize the footprint of the building by overlaying it on top of the existing EV2 building. The building, completed in August 2011, is a 57,000- square-foot addition and 5,000-sq.ft. renovation to EV2.

Bridging over the top of the existing building was critical because the site is cramped for space with the campus ring road running around it.

The key features are two 32.8 ft by 154 ft. trusses which create the sides of the third and fourth floors, said Thompson. These are in turn supported by columns away from EV2.

These support five other 16.4 ft. by 98.4 ft. beams which create the fourth floor while the third floor hangs from the trusses.

While the trusses and structural steel are visible from some vantages, in others they’ve been obscured by walls or steel siding panels.

“It’s not something you do every day,” said Thompson noting that fabrication of the trusses was performed in three parts in Telco Steel Works’ Guelph yard. Sections were delivered to the site where they were assembled and hoisted into place.

“It took about two days and we had to shut the campus road down,” he said. “There was quite a crowd. There were three cranes, one I think about a 650-ton lift and the other two about 450 tonnes or so.”

The sections went together quite easily on site and locked into place without issue, he said.