InfraStructures - April 2011 - The Enveloppe, Please...

The Enveloppe, Please...

The five winners of the 2011 Alberta Steel Design Awards of Excellence have been announced in the Alberta Ballroom of Northlands Edmonton Exposition Centre.

The winners were applauded by hundreds of engineers, architects, contractors, construction owners, government and industry leaders who are gathered for the biggest celebration of steel design in Canada.

The biennial CISC Award celebration promotes the structural steel industry within the Alberta region and across Canada by recognizing exceptional talent and ingenuity in steel design and the innovative use of steel in addressing a variety of construction challenges.

This year’s outstanding winners embody the theme of the 2011 event: Advantage Stee …Building an Iconic Future.

The 2011 awards drew 45 project submissions, making it the most diverse and exciting display of steel design and construction ever assembled in the event’s history. From bridges to fabrication plants to iconic urban buildings, these designs represent the state-of-the-art in architecture, engineering, fabrication and sustainability in the steel construction industry.

And the Winners Are...
Art Gallery of Alberta, winner of the 2011 Architectural Award
The project, on the edge of Edmonton’s downtown Churchill Square, is a renovation of the existing concrete building to create expanded, flexible, museum quality space for the gallery’s permanent collection and major traveling exhibitions.

The renovation consisted of a two-story vertical addition above the existing building to contain gallery space and offices, and the addition of an atrium that exhibits the creative and dramatic use of steel to invoke the borealis.

The Bow, winner of the 2011 Engineering Award
The Bow, the iconic crescent shaped office tower rising on the east side of Calgary’s downtown core, has provided a spectacular show for Calgarians during its construction. Spectators might not have realized they are also witnessing a North American first.

The Bow is unique on the continent in its application of a triangular steel diagrid system to a curved building. The diagrid, composed of six-storey high diagonal elements, creates a perimeter frame of linked equilateral triangles curved to match the bow of the building on the north and south faces.

Dawson Bridge Rehabilitation, winner of the 2011 Sustainability Award
While Edmonton’s Dawson Bridge has been in service for nearly 100 years, innovative technology has turned it into a modern world leader.

Shell Canada Energy Reactor Building Modifications, winner of the 2011 Industrial Award
As industrial construction goes, designing and building overhead crane runway support systems is nothing out of the ordinary. But the project to retrofit the Shell Canada Energy Reactor Building into a fabrication facility presented the design-build team with unique challenges requiring creative design and installation solutions.

Whitemud Drive/Quesnell Bridge Rehabilitation, winner of the 2011 Steel Edge Award
The Quesnell Bridge is located on Edmonton’s busiest traffic corridor, the Whitemud Freeway, with volumes of more than 120 000 vehicles per day. When this section of the freeway needed widening, rerouting that traffic onto a detour was not an option. This presented a particular challenge with respect to widening the bridge.

CISC congratulates the winners, and all of the finalists for the 2011 Alberta Steel Design Awards of Excellence!

Source: Canadian Institute of Steel Construction