The Builders L
et’s begin with the building itself, the 21,000 square metre physical facility known as the National Institute for Nanotechnology where researchers, scientists, academics, students and industry players are gathering to try to exploit the potential of materials that range in size from one to 100 nanometres. Perched on the north side of campus, from the outside it’s an attractive if not remarkable building, a six-storey rectangle with another one-storey square attached to the north wall. But inside it’s a whole new ball game. First of all you can’t get access to any of its floors without signing in with the security guard at the front desk who’ll issue you a pass and then call whomever you’re meeting to come and get you or meet you getting off the elevator. Even the elevator itself is a little different, as architect Donna Clare, ’79 BSc, who was senior project leader for the design of NINT, points out as she runs her hand over the unusual amount of written instructions on the elevator’s wall. “Because it’s a NRC and U of A co-venture,” she says, “all of the signage had to be bilingual, or trilingual if you count the Braille on the buttons.” This new partnership between the federal government, represented by the NRC, and the provincial government, represented by the University of Alberta, also meant that even before construction began some governance issues had to be incorporated into the design of the building. “From the NRC side you have the security protocols associated with all national research facilities,” says Clare. “But at the same time the upper floor for the university students is usually more open. So you have to address both these needs.” NINT is actually owned by the University and leased by the NRC. The Faculty of Engineering also sub-leases two floors. The top two floors are for the University while the fourth floor is called the ‘incubator floor’ and is 16
new trail
SUMMER 2007
Phil Haswell (right) and Hal Amick run some tests on the vibration pads for the NINT building (under construction below). Amick is an engineer with Colin Gordon & Assoc., a Californiabased vibration-testing consultant firm.
described by Phil Haswell, ’75 BSc, ’77 BEd, Engineering’s director of facilities, as a place where “businesses that have an idea which may use nanotechnology are put cheek by jowl with the research being conducted here so they can use the expertise to bring their product to market. The whole fourth floor is dedicated to that with laboratory and office space.” “That’s one of the other things that’s interesting about this building,” says Clare. “It’s interdisciplinary. It’s not designed for chemists or biologists or physicists or mathematicians or medicine. It’s designed to potentially accommodate all of those groups. So
flexibility, both long term and short term, is important to the building. A lot of the design decisions were made around the concept of how do you create a space that’s very flexible while still accommodating the specificity you need for this kind of research. “One of the standard formulas is 80-20 — 80 percent generic and 20 percent specific. That’s kind of the balance you try to achieve.” One of the specific design challenges was the characterization area on the ground floor — the box attached to the side that’s dubbed ‘Canada’s quietest space.’ This is where the atoms and molecules that make up the material under scrutiny in nanotechnology are ‘characterized’ by very powerful and very finicky microscopes that don’t tolerate noise, vibrations, temperature variations or electrical interference. That’s why three different vibration pads were constructed on the site and their different tolerances tested before choosing the right design of the 11 vibration pads that now underlie this area. Clare, originally from Grimshaw, Alberta, and a partner at Cohos Evamy, the firm that designed the building, could not possibly have imagined