Team members involved in the redevelopment of a significant new asset at Hamilton, Ont.’s McMaster Innovation Park (MIP) say they are already reaping the benefits of the decision to proceed using Integrated Project Delivery (IPD).
MIP project management office director Frances Grabowski told viewers watching day two of the Hamilton-Halton Construction Association’s (HHCA) virtual construction forecast event Jan. 20 that the adaptive reuse of the former Hamilton Spectator building at 44 Frid St. is in the validation stage after the property was acquired last March.
The project involves turning the newspaper press room and 180,000-square-foot office building into 300,000 square feet of 12-megawatt data centre and 165,000 square feet of life science laboratory space.
Thanks to IPD, Grabowski explained, the team determined development can be fast-tracked through part of the permitting stage.
“We have confirmed through the IPD pre-validation stage that the project will not require a zoning or site plan application and that we will move directly to building permit,” Grabowski said.
“We met with the city in a very collaborative process and met with planning and building and understood what we needed to do to move this project into construction, and we determined that we didn’t need site plan approval because we weren’t impacting the site. We were just repurposing the building within its footprint.
“So we were able to take the money that we had set aside in the risk register and put it back into the project.”
Four months of IPD validation for 44 Frid has produced plans for costs and design, with early-phase input from multiple participants enabling rapid development of marketing materials.
“One of the things about 44 Frid is that it’s very dark,” said Grabowski. “It’s a very 1960s, ‘70s type building. So we cut through the middle and put in an atrium to bring light into that space because we were really focusing on wellness. We were able to put marketing materials together to go out to the street.”
Grabowski spent most of her presentation describing how IPD has big advantages over traditional project delivery in certain types of projects. Key MIP players were consulted using a weighted scoring system and 44 Frid came in as conclusively suitable for IPD.
“High performance, innovative, funding and schedule constraints, those are the things you want to look at,” she explained, noting with traditional bid-build contracts contractors and subs often come in later, even though they may have expertise that could be useful in the early design and costing stages.
“With your GC and your subtrades, what happens is everyone stays in their lanes, and they think of their own issues, everyone’s for themselves,” she said of traditional contracts. “And it just generates a combative type environment which is what we want to see change.”
IPD means fewer boundaries within the project, Grabowski said.
“It could be a joining agreement with the owner, the contractors and the subtrades, and the culture is to push through to one-plus-one-equals-three. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Consultant Stephanie Carter, who was brought in as an IPD coach, explained her role to the HHCA audience.
“We’re assembling the team sooner than on other construction delivery methods,” she said. “What we’re doing is really focusing on cost. And then designing to the cost, and then constructing also to that cost instead of conventional, which might be to design and then cost, and then to rework and then construct to the redesigned, re-engineered scope.”
The conventional method increases the likelihood of change orders and RFIs, Carter said.
Another example of the benefits of IPD is how the team dealt with micropiles for 44 Frid, Grabowski said. Through early due diligence it was determined that micropiles would be needed so the team brought in a micropile contractor to advise on cost.
Last July MIP announced that Laurentis Energy Partners, a subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation, would become a tenant at 44 Frid. Laurentis is active as a consultant and researcher on nuclear power innovations.
Delivery of the revamped 44 Frid is targeted for July 2022.
Last May, MIP unveiled its new focus as a Life Sciences Innovation Megahub. At full build-out MIP will have 2.5-million square feet of life sciences, advanced materials and manufacturing, and information and communications space.
Another piece of the puzzle came in November when MIP and CCRM, a specialist in developing regenerative medicine-based technologies and cell and gene therapies, announced they had signed a letter of intent to partner in the development of a biomanufacturing campus at MIP.
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