Ramped up

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/06/2016 (3561 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Inside the south end of the new $181-million addition to Winnipeg’s downtown convention centre, which most members of the public will never see, there is a large, circular ramp that snakes its way from street level to the top floor of the massive three-storey structure.

The ramp is wide enough to fit five cars, side by side. It needed to be that wide so the newer semi-trailers, which are more than 22 metres long, can manoeuvre around the turns in the ramp as they haul things such as boats and cars up to the second and third-floor exhibition halls (and down again).

And it’s that ramp, not constructing the building’s cavernous third-floor exhibit hall, which stretches for a full city block without a single support pillar, that posed one of the biggest challenges for the project’s general contractor — Stuart Olson Construction — and the multi-discipline design team.

That’s not to say that building a room that size, with no support pillars and floors strong enough to handle 300 pounds of weight per square foot — more than most highway bridges — was easy, said Paul Polson, Stuart Olson’s senior vice-president for business development and community engagement.

“It was a challenge, for sure, but it wasn’t unusual,” Polson said, noting there are lots of buildings being built these days with those kinds of big, open spaces.

“So for the structural engineering firms that work on these projects, that’s second nature to them — doing convention centres, airports and all that sort of thing.”

But the same can’t be said for the indoor ramp in the RBC Winnipeg Convention Centre addition, a portion of which was turned over to the convention centre in late October of last year in time to host the Grey Cup gala, with the rest turned over March 1.

“It is quite a unique convention centre when you look around and compare it to others because you’ve got exhibition floors up on the second and third floors that you’ve got to get truck access to,” Polson explained.

They also had a limited amount of space to work with, he added, because there were a lot of other things that had to fit into that “back-of-house” area — things such as giant commissaries, kitchens, freezers, coolers, storage rooms and most of the building’s mechanical and electrical equipment.

Convention centre president and CEO Klaus Lahr said he can understand why Polson cited the construction of the indoor ramp as one of the biggest challenges to overcome in building the new wing.

“It really is a 180-degree turn (on the ramp). It’s like a huge question mark that not only has a grade in one direction, but in some areas has three directional grades,” he said. “So that ramp was quite the engineering feat.

‘It’s a one-off building for Winnipeg, and so for us, you want to kind of say, ‘we built that.’ There’s not going to be another one like it in Winnipeg’– Paul Polson, Stuart Olson’s senior vice-president for business development and commercial engagement 

To make matters more complicated yet, the kitchen facility is right under the ramp,” Lahr added. “You have no idea how many proposals we kicked around and how many models we dealt with. We had animated models, we had computer models that we worked with. And you’ve got to see (before you begin building it) that a tractor-trailer can actually make that corner, right? You can’t build it and then say, ‘Oops! We made it about three feet too narrow!’”

Other notable challenges the project posed were ensuring there would be no vibration in the building when the big trucks are moving around inside, connecting the new wing to the existing building without disrupting any of the events going on there, and finding a way to divide up the large mechanical-and-engineering contract so smaller, local firms would get a piece of the action, Polson said.

While it had its fair share of challenges, Polson said the three-year convention centre expansion wasn’t the most challenging project Stuart Olson has tackled in Winnipeg. There have been some large, acute-care, hospital projects that were far more complicated.

But it was certainly one of the most interesting projects, he added. And what made it more memorable is that it was completed on time and on budget. In fact, portions of it were completed a few weeks ahead of schedule.

“So it’s right up there on our list of things that we’ve worked on and are very proud of,” Polson added. “It’s a one-off building for Winnipeg, and so for us, you want to kind of say, ‘we built that.’ There’s not going to be another one like it in Winnipeg.

And he (Lahr) ended up with the building he wanted,” he added.”It’s spanning York (Avenue), it’s got the ‘wow’ factor to it… it’s got everything that he needs.”

Lahr agreed everything turned out great. And he had nothing but praise for the way Stuart Olson handled the project.

“I cannot say enough about their co-operation and their willingness to work with us. Their quality of work has been excellent. We have no complaints whatsoever.”

But he and Polson noted that in a big, successful project like this, it’s more than just the general contractor who deserves credit. The three levels of government, members of the convention centre’s board, the project’s design team, the subcontractors — they all played a role in the project’s success.

“We really worked as a tight team,” Lahr said. 

“It was real team work that pulled this thing off,” Polson added.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca