Walter Bettio

"The area was so constrained that during construction we had very little lay-down space, so staging the project from a construction point of view was very difficult," says project architect Walter Bettio, of architectsAlliance.
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"The same difficulty was carried into the internal disposition of program elements throughout the building," Bettio says.

Despite the constraining nature of the site, designers were able to remain flexible while constructing interior spaces that were designated as lab areas.Because of the rapidly changing nature of cellular and biomolecular technology, school officials wanted to ensure that the facility could adapt to new developments.

"Genome research or biological research at this point is done a certain way, but that is not inherently the way it is going to be done 10 to 20 years from now," Bettio says.
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"Our building reflects a modern sensibility and employs a lot of modern materials," Bettio says.
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"Between the buffering of noise and the tempering of air, the south façade has proven to be effective at providing a good work environment for those people," Bettio says.

Project Architects: Walter Bettio, Deni Papetti (architectsAlliance); Volker Biermann, (Behnisch Architekten)

According to Walter Bettio, an Architects Alliance associate and project director for the Computer Science Building, the architects took a holistic environmental approach, considering more than energy efficiency in its design.

He says: "We chose elements requiring very low energy to produce, and which were low in volatile organic compounds.We kept toxic emissions from primers and adhesives down during construction."

For the concrete, the architects specified fly ash to replace 50 percent of the more typical Portland cement, which requires a great deal of energy to produce and gives off a lot of carbon-dioxide during its manufacture."By substituting fly ash, a byproduct of burning coal, Bettio explains, "we reduced the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere during construction, enormously."

They also reduced electricity consumption for lighting by about half because of ample natural light and the use of indirect, up-and-down, and semidirect electric lighting.Energy output for the building's steam heating system has been about 40 percent lower than for a comparable campus building, although some of that is attributable to an unusually mild first winter.

Assessing Performance

While there are no design or engineering breakthroughs in the building, Bettio notes, there are refinements of proven green principles "integrated with more sophisticated building technologies and a reinterpretation of how to move air around and how to orient building programs to take best advantage of the sun's orientation."

Walter Bettio, Architect, Architects Alliance

Wafter Bettio, associate architect in charge of the project at ArchitectsAlliance in Toronto said: "The primary inspiration for this façade was to create a symbolic pattern consistent with genetic DNA markers.

WALTER BETTIO
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During the past 20 years, Walter Bettio has excelled at merging modern design with innovative building science.Walter has been involved in almost two dozen significant academic and institutional architecture projects since joining architectsAlliance and its predecessor firm.He plays a leading role on the studio's large, multidisciplinary projects, including the award-winning York University Computer Science Building; the Fred Kaiser Engineering Building at the University of British Columbia; and the University of Toronto's Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research.

Currently, he is the Associate in charge of a large mixed-used project in historic Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and is extending his strong design influence to a handful of other mixed-use projects now under development.Walter is a graduate of the University of Waterloo where he was the recipient of the Guild medal for design excellence from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.Walter is active in academics and is an Adjunct Professor at the Waterloo School of Architecture.

WALTERBETTIO Walter Bettio