The Business of Making Over an Old School

When the Queen’s School of Business held its opening day ceremonies for Goodes Hall on Sept 12, 2002, three of the invited guests were former honor roll students who, in 1934, attended the Victoria School, a circa-1892 facility that was remodeled, expanded, and transformed into the newest building on the Queen’s University campus in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

The names of former students were discovered by chance. As with all projects involving the remodel of a historic structure, there are surprises hiding behind old walls and underneath worn floors.

"During the selective demolition the old slate blackboards were taken off and we found the old blackboards, which are just black paint right on the wall," says Peter Berton, partner-in-charge of the project for Toronto-based The Ventin Group. "There was still writing on them and one of the things was the honor role list from 1934, and there were 12 or 13 names on it. We put a story in the newspaper asking if anybody knew where these people were now-they’d be 80 or so because the list was for grade eight-and four responded." The fourth lived overseas and couldn’t attend the grand opening.

PROJECT DATA

Architect: The Ventin Group Ltd.
General Contractor: Bondfield Construction
Planning Advisor: Roger du Toit Architects
Landscape Architect: du Toit, Allsopp, Hiller
Electrical Engineer: Morrison Hershfield
Mechanical Engineer: Marshall, Macklin, Monaghan
Structural Engineer: Carruthers & Wallace
Cost Consultant: Vermeulens
Project Manager: William Germinario
Site Supervisor: Doug Bateman
Acoustics: Valcoustics
Audio-Visual: Tempest Corp.
Cost: $13.4 million USD

The former students’ attendance was an exciting opportunity to merge the history of the 19th century, 45,000-square-foot, Richardsonian Romanesque elementary school building with the 21st century 113,000-square-foot, modern streamlined university hall that now occupies the site. But, marrying the old with the new is a specialty of The Ventin Group, and, as with the finished Goodes Hall, the old and the new blend famously.

New Business for an Old School

Located on the left edge of the university campus, the historic elementary school had been in limbo for about 10 or 11 years. The structure consists of the original red brick building, a 1913 addition that matched it aesthetically, and a 1951 steel frame and brick addition built onto the back of the school that served as a gym.

"The university added a floor within the gym height and they had their registrars office in there, but the rest of the building was vacant," says Berton. "It was quite rough."

When the university bought the structure and annexed it for future development, locating the business school within was not intended. But, as with the old chalkboards, surprises are part of every project. The business school had been looking around for a building in which it could consolidate its scattered facilities and the Victoria School, with its large classrooms and room for expansion and parking seemed like a good fit-especially after suffering several failed attempts to obtain other buildings.

Main Entrance

"What we did was, we went in and did a study to examine how well [the business school] would fit in there and determine how much space they needed-and, of course, they wanted a lot more space than they could afford," says Berton.

With The Ventin Group already hired to work on the Victoria School-it was originally envisioned as a registrars and student services facility-Berton and his team now found themselves in charge of the business school and a much larger project than expected.

Respecting the Original

Successfully and artfully combining old and new requires one guiding principal, according to Berton: don’t copy the old building. "It’s not respectful to the old building to either mimic it or stand on top of it. A new addition will always take a backseat," he says. "We give the existing building some breathing room so it doesn’t look like it’s being sat on. We step back from the old building and open it up between the old and the new."

The separation of space in this building comes in the form of a 2,000-square-foot atrium joining the red brick Victoria School with the limestone addition.

Queen’s School of Business

"We created the atrium to enclose the older, historic gabled walls into the space, thereby creating an atrium that is a lot more interesting and textured and warm and active than many others," explains Berton.

The design team conducted a thorough search and visited many college campuses in Canada and the United States looking at atrium designs. The project’s original design called for a much larger atrium, but Berton says he toured larger ones that often lacked intimacy and had no sense of scale so he downsized the one at Queen’s University.

Lecture Hall

The atrium is now the heart of the school and is called the "hive," and is the spot where a majority of the project’s budget was spent. According to Berton, "it was intended to be a meeting place-or a cross pollination spot-for the students who previously were all spread out. I understand that when the new students came in, they walked in the building and their mouths were agape. The space was so nice they couldn’t believe it. The dean was telling me that he watched the kids come in the first few days and loved watching their faces."

Education Space

On either side of the atrium stands a large classroom structure. As with most historic structures, the Victoria School needed some restoration work, but aside from the 1934 chalkboards, the project was happily free of major surprises. The roof was replaced with lead-coated copper; there was major brick restoration; and new windows added, new flooring installed, and a new HVAC system added. In addition, the corner finials on the tower were replaced; the basement was completely gutted; and all wainscoting was taken off, stripped, and reinstalled. Lastly, in the 1913 addition, the wide hallways-16 to 18 feet-were narrowed and the borrowed space incorporated into the lecture halls. However, reconfiguring the hallways at the back of the building-the hallways in the 1892 building were kept intact-required removal of masonry walls, so a major amount of steel reinforcement was added to strengthen the building and make it seismic-compliant; Kingston is an earthquake-sensitive zone, Berton points out.

On the other side of the atrium stands the large addition, which houses three main lecture halls at the center of the building and about 100 faculty offices. The offices are wrapped around the lecture halls, forming the building’s perimeter, so each office has a window. "It’s a very regular grid mix and allowed us to be very repetitive in the design of the façade," says Berton.

PRODUCT DATA

Construction Materials
Acoustical Ceilings: Bailey; Armstrong
Aluminum Windows: Alumicor
Brick/masonry: Skycon Building Products
Composite Metal Panels: Rheinzink
Door Hardware: Medeco; LCN; Schlage
Elevator: Thysen-Krupp
Insulation: Chem-Thane
Millwork-Laminate: Pionite
Paint: ICI
Roofing: Soprema
Skylights: Alumicor
Structural Glazing/Glass: Inkan
Wood Door: Cambridge Door

Carpet and Flooring
Base: Roppe
Carpet: Collins & Aikman
Ceramic Tile: Olympia Tile
Limestone Floor Tile: Arriscraft
Vinyl Composition Tile: Armstrong

Washroom Equipment/Supplies
Drinking Fountain: Haws
Hand Drying Equipment: Nova
Washroom Fixtures: Eljer
Washroom/Shower Partitions: Shanahan’s Manufacturing

Lighting
Lighting: Prescolite; Lithonia; Kirlin

Finishes
Chalkboards: Architectural School Products
Draperies/Binds: Sun Project

Within the addition, the offices are located on three levels, but the lecture halls take up only two. "We squeezed another half-floor of area in the same volume you can do two, thereby lowering construction costs per square foot." Berton explains. The main floor of the historic building, like most, is raised about four feet off the ground. The addition’s first floor is also raised up to that level and from there Berton went up one lecture theater height, which is slightly more than two floors, and they were able to squeeze out enough space for the extra offices.

The lecture halls themselves are "designed for a business-type education," says Berton, explaining the theaters’ horseshoe-shape layout. "The school wanted students to see each other’s faces. Typically, lecture halls have a bit of a curve to them, but students are still ultimately looking forward." The lecture halls in the older building have a similar layout, but are smaller.

Both the old and the new spaces are fully wired so students can plug in their laptops-which they’re required to have-anywhere in the building. "Wherever they can sit down, there’s a plug," says Berton. There are breakout rooms for smaller groups and other sitting areas and niches where students can work and-and again everything is wired for laptop use.

Biggest Challenge

While the atrium deftly connects the old with the new, Berton and his team still had to aesthetically link the two structures. That was the biggest challenge Berton explains. "It’s how they meet and how they blend."

"The university’s buildings are made of stone and the [Victoria] school is made of brick. The university wanted a stone building, they didn’t want brick," he says. "And, you don’t want to copy the brick because you don’t want to fight with the old building."

Berton explains that he slid the limestone addition behind the old Victoria School and wove the brickwork into the structure to make it convincing. They found brick that almost perfectly matched the old school and built a colonnade in front of the addition to blend the two. "It allows this historic building to finally be a part of the university campus," Berton says proudly.