Design award for Enterprise Square

The University of Alberta and Stantec Architecture Ltd. have been presented with a prestigious award for the university's new downtown campus, Enterprise Square.

Originally constructed in 1939 at a price of $1 million as a Hudson's Bay department store, the historic building sat largely empty, save a few street-level tenants, for nearly 15 years. In 2005 the U of A, city of Edmonton, province of Alberta and the federal government joined forces to purchase the building so it could be turned into a downtown campus.

The renovation's architecture has impressed a blue-ribbon panel of judges appointed to adjudicate the Edmonton Urban Design Awards. Enterprise Square was one of three local buildings presented with the Excellence in Urban Architecture Award.

Judges for the competition, staged by the Royal Architecture Society of Canada, said they were initially impressed with the building's new purpose, calling it "a great re-use of a historical resource."

"It's a pretty heady list of names on the jury, and I think that a number of them just thought that this is a pretty bold piece of architecture," said Len Rodriguez, the university's architect. "A number of them think that the very act of transforming this building from what it used to be - a department store - into a post-secondary institution in the heart of the city is a bold, audacious move. And the results are stunning."

John Webster, Stantec's lead architect for the project, said financial considerations always come into play in a building's design - but financial decisions in this case neatly fit a desire to acknowledge the building's historic past. The flooring, for example, has mostly been left as unfinished concrete with a coating to keep dust down. And a terrazzo floor that was discovered was not restored, but kept in the state it was found.

"There were places where the terrazzo had been broken and taken out and there were a couple where we tried to match the terrazzo... but it is part of a natural expression of what the building was, and there will be places where there is a diagonal line running across the room where they chopped the floor up and ran a conduit to a cash register . . . we acknowledged right from the beginning that we weren't going to repair or replace the terrazzo because there were better things to use the limited amount of money on."

Another striking feature of the building is a new atrium, which draws natural light in from the fourth floor to the main level.

"It connects the natural flow of people downtown," said Rodriguez. "It's like being in Grand Central Station."

The Faculty of Extension, which serves more than 10,000 students a year, moved into Enterprise Square this fall. More recently, the university's Alumni Affairs office moved into the building. More administrative units are slated to move into the building within the next few months. Enterprise Square's main tenant will be TEC Edmonton, a technology commercialization unit run jointly by the U of A and the city. TEC Edmonton's administration office will move into the building before Christmas, and its tenant labs will be moved into Enterprise Square by the end of January.