Labour of love

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/11/2018 (1989 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There was more than the usual sense of community accomplishment expressed at the opening of Red River College’s Skilled Trades and Technology Centre on Thursday.

The province’s investment of $61.6 million in the construction of the 104,000 square foot building — which RRC president Paul Vogt said will be the college’s new flagship building — was clearly appreciated by Vogt and the RRC community.

But in the case of this state-of-the-art training centre — that will house the college’s teaching labs for electrical, carpentry, mechanical engineering technology, computer aided drafting, refrigeration and air conditioning and a few other apprenticeship programs — the undertaking was an opportunity for the whole of the construction trades to play a much larger role than normal.

Vogt said, “People say it takes a village to raise a child, well, in this case it took a whole city to build a building.”

Akman Construction, the general contractors on the project, along with about 60 sub-trades were responsible for the employment of about 1,000 people who took part in the construction of the building, about 75 per cent of whom were Red River College grads.

Doug Hanna, partner at Number TEN Architectural Group, who designed the building, said, “It is somewhat like the circle of life. They were educated here and they came back” to build the training centre that will probably be around for the next 100 years.

In addition to a traditional building trades training complex, the centre will also include a $15-million 8,000 square foot Smart Factory addition that is still under construction and is to be completed next year.

Vogt took a playful shot at people who still refer to Red River College as a “trades school.”

“OK,” he said. “We are a trades school. We’ll own that. But when people say that, I think they don’t know the half of it. There are more than 21,000 students here and more than 200 programs. We are meeting the needs of every single element of the Manitoba labour force.”

To underline that point, Red River College’s robot-in-residence, Baxter, performed the traditional ribbon cutting.

“Red River College started 80 years ago as a trade school and for all that time we have been the major educator of trades people in the province,” Vogt said. “Quite literally Red River College grads built Manitoba.”

And because of that legacy Vogt said the construction of the Skilled Trades and Technology Centre had the feel of being a labour of love and had an extra level of commitment to the process.

Students and staff had a hand in several elements of the design and built many of the work stations in the labs like the workbenches in the carpentry lab, tool cabinets and the interior and exterior brickwork was designed in the college’s masonry program. Full-sized curtainwall mock-ups were built and tested in the college’s Building Envelope Technology Access Centre program.

And students were given unique work experience opportunities. For instance, Allison Enns, a construction management student had all sorts of work placements with various stages of the design and construction process, winding up with a job at Akman Construction.

The new space will become the training site for about 1,000 students per day and will allow the college to boost its training capacity by 30 per cent in high-demand trades.

Hanna said part of the vision of the building was as an “innovation accelerator.” To help with inspiration, throughout the building there are hundreds of tools and pieces of tools embedded in the concrete floor — a hammer head here, a pair of pliers over there, screws, vice-grips and all sorts of old tools.

All along the length of the building’s “galleria” the specific trades shops all have glazed windows connecting to the main hallway giving each space a very open feel. The ceiling in the carpentry workshop is high enough to construct a two-storey house.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca