Steel from Royal Ontario Museum is reused at University of Toronto at Scarborough

The demolition of the Royal Ontario Museum's Terrace Galleries this summer, to make way for the new Michael A. Lee Chin Crystal expansion, yielded enough steel to be reused at the new Student Centre at U of T's Scarborough campus. Toronto's Dunlop Architects Inc., who have designed the new facility, will use the steel as a visible monument to the idea of reusing building materials. The reuse of the materials came about as a result of notification by the structural engineers, Halsall Associates, who are working on both the ROM expansion and the Student Centre. The architects adjusted the design for the 2000-square foot area to accommodate over-ceiling services in the corridor area while in the offices the columns and beams will remain exposed. This will demonstrate that columns and beams are reuse materials which will be put in place as bolted connections that can potentially be unbolted and reused in the future.
The building is being designed to meet the "Silver" level of the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) program. In addition to a long list of other environmentally-friendly initiatives, the building will carry a green roof over the student office wing. The green roof will reduce summer solar gain and storm water run-off.
The re-use of materials, says firm principal and designer of the new Centre Stephen Phillips, "avoids extraction of new resources from the earth and saves the energy and pollution associated with the mining and manufacturing processes."

Steel and Sustainability II: Recovery

Canadian Architect, March 2004

ROM donates old steel to the University of Toronto at Scarborough (date of reused steel: 1970s)

In 2003, Dunlop Architects and Halsall Engineers came up with the idea that part of the material for a new Student Centre for the University of Toronto at Scarborough could come from existing sources. Halsall, who are presently working on demolishing part of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, proposed reusing girders from the ROM for the Student Centre. Since Halsall had been involved with the addition to the ROM building in the late 1970s, they had all the necessary archives for demonstrating the material quality of the steel to be reused--therefore no testing was required. However, the biggest challenge was for the architect to coordinate the transfer of donated steel from the ROM building to the University of Toronto. This administrative aspect had to be factored into a fabrication schedule and fortunately, amounted to an approximate savings of 18 tons of steel.