U of W scientists ready to roll

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James Currie, University of Winnipeg's associate dean of science, stands in the bright atrium of the new Richardson College for the Environment and Science Complex.

It's amazing what kind of science complex $66.58 million will buy you these days.

Especially when you adorn the walls of a magnificent four-storey atrium with the floor boards of the roller-skating rink that proudly occupied the space for decades.

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Exterior of Richardson College for the Environment and Science Complex.

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The digital learning lab will be an innovative place for university and high school students, says Jodene Baccus, the U of W’s director of community learning.

"It's pretty flashy," said an admiring James Currie, the associate dean of science, who will be promoted to acting dean of science before the Richardson College for the Environment and Science Complex welcomes its first students in September.

"It's a banner year for science," said Currie with considerable understatement. "We're hiring 12 tenure-track people."

Two blocks west of the main campus, on the north side of Portage Avenue between Furby and Langside streets, the new science complex will host 2,000 students a day.

Start with the edifice, with letters and numbers scattered about artistically -- they're elements within the periodic table.

"They've selected elements which are critical to life," explained Currie.

All critical to life, except, he acknowledged, the symbol for krypton, which Currie said has been included in case Superman drops by and gets rowdy.

A lab guy who does stand-up comedy?

"I'm a pure mathematician," said Currie.

But his building will abound with boffins, including three Canada Research Chairs and expert academics in chemistry, biology and environmental studies.

However, let's not get ahead of ourselves -- stay in the atrium for a bit.

"The atrium is going to have nine full-sized (Amstel King fig) trees," he said. "With the skylight overhead, you get real light in almost every office."

Dozens of offices face the atrium, including think-tanks on the third floor on the Portage side in areas such as indigenous science education, inner-city issues and community renewal. Currie drew names out of a hat to see which office would get which element's symbol -- seriously, everyone wanted Au, gold -- on their window.

The inside southern wall of the atrium, with floors of labs, classrooms and offices, has nifty wood panels.

"All that wood, that's the floor of the roller rink. We sent it out to Steinbach to be refinished," Currie said.

Also on the main floor, just inside the entrance, is Elements, a licensed restaurant. Yes, licensed -- we'll all cross our fingers that the scientists avail themselves of the licensed part after, not before, they experiment with chemicals.

The periodic table design was for the chemists, said Currie, so throughout the atrium wall are woven an artist's representation of DNA sequencing for the biologists.

There are more than 30 research and teaching labs, each one state-of-the-art. This is beyond Bunsen burners and a sink at each student's work station. Way, way beyond.

Currie popped into the chordate lab, where long tube devices hang from the ceiling. They are snorkels, he said, a form of fume hood that would suck up all the smelly stuff from dissections and preservatives and send them to the mechanical room near the top of the building, where the bad stuff is filtered out and the air is recycled and the heat reused.

As impressive as the classrooms are, the science space is pretty much the same as the U of W had at the main campus to the east, said Currie. It's just a lot newer and far more impressive.

"It's a minor expansion of teaching space," he said.

Back at Richardson College, Currie noted an oddity that maybe one of the eminent science researchers could explain: "This building seems to be bigger on the inside than the outside."

That it does.

Up on the top level, there's an 1,100-square-foot greenhouse.

And among the many new features is the bat cave -- the U of W is hoping for a donation from Bruce Wayne, perhaps -- where urban bats will be studied.

"People don't necessarily think of bats in the city, but they're here," said Currie. Behind an innocuous door on the top floor lies an enormous mechanical room Currie compares to the engine room of a nuclear submarine, or a control room of a nuclear reactor. Dials and gizmos are everywhere, and within several chambers viewed through portholes, filters clean and reuse air and water brought from throughout the complex.

Gosh, wonder what would happen if you pushed one of those red buttons...

"They recirculate water, they recirculate air. It's a really high-tech building," said Currie.

OK, soon-to-be-acting-dean, the big question: Will this help the U of W attract students who might otherwise go to the University of Manitoba?

"It can't hurt. This is world-class," he said. The building is going to welcome high school students with its digital learning lab on the main floor along the Portage Avenue sidewalk.

"It's modelled on something we saw in Chicago," said Jodene Baccus, director of community learning. "It's targeted to the way you learn -- it will be part of our library."

After school, evenings and weekends, high school students can come by to chat, work together and check out a laptop to be used in the lab. During the day, the U of W Collegiate and the university's model school for high school dropouts will use the space.

The science complex is connected to the recently built McFeetors Hall residence and to the U of W Students Association daycare centre, the largest in the inner city.

Completing the U of W property is a large, ugly, parking lot along Langside Street behind the complex.

It goes without saying that U of W president Lloyd Axworthy believes empty spaces are vacuums to be filled. And amid the talk of chemistry, biology and environmental studies, where are the physicists?

Currie says that ugly parking lot is the potential future home of a physics building that could include a particle accelerator and maybe a new home for Canada's production of medical isotopes.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Don't know much biology? You can learn here

The University of Winnipeg will officially open the Richardson College for the Environment and Science Complex at 599 Portage Ave. at 10 a.m. on June 27.

The 150,000-square-foot complex costs $66.58 million and adds 15 per cent to the U of W's building space. It will be connected to the main campus two blocks east by a green corridor built behind existing buildings on the north side of Portage Avenue.

Built to exacting environmental and energy standards that emphasize sustainability, the new complex will add $1.5 million to the U of W's annual operating costs.

The official opening is followed at noon by a free public forum on greening the city -- particularly the inner city.

Free public tours will be offered from 1 to 4 p.m. that day.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 17, 2011 B1