On April 25, SFU’s new Sustainable Energy Engineering Building opened in Surrey, BC. Designed by Revery Architecture, the academic research facility will house the Sustainable Energy Engineering program, Western Canada’s first accredited undergraduate energy engineering program. The program will offer an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach to energy engineering education to support the clean tech, renewable and sustainable energy sector.
Expanding beyond its Central City campus, the five-storey facility is part of SFU’s development of an integrated academic precinct within the growing City Centre neighbourhood. The building is funded in part by the federal government’s Post-Secondary Institutions Strategic Investment Fund (SIF), with additional investment from provincial government and SFU’s own funds and donors.
The building program is organized around a central atrium and includes wet and dry teaching and research labs; collaboration and study spaces; faculty, graduate and administrative offices; recreational rooms; undergraduate and graduate lounges spaces, student services, and plant maintenance facilities. The atrium’s sweeping staircase is punctuated by tree pods, bringing nature indoors. A 400-seat lecture hall on the southwestern portion of the ground floor will serve the full SFU Surrey campus as well as the broader Surrey community.
Approximately 515 students and 60 faculty and staff will use the research, innovation and commercialization space in the 20,717-square-metre LEED Gold-targeted facility.
The expedited schedule for the new building required a fast-track delivery method, where design and construction phases of the project significantly overlapped. The constrained schedule was also a fundamental consideration in the decision to use prefabricated precast elements for the façade, which not only allowed the building to be closed in quickly, but also minimized construction debris and noise impact on site. Made of undulating concrete sandwich panels, the design derives from abstracted circuit board imagery.
