Mohawk's $30 million innovation
'Massive' changes create 'real world' clusters resembling workplaces, not classrooms
April 26, 2010
Wade Hemsworth
The Hamilton Spectator
http://www.thespec.com/News/Local/article/758498
On the outside, it will be a new front door to Mohawk College, turning the face of the school toward Fennell Avenue.
On the inside, it will be a modern, sustainable learning space for 2,000 new students, with a stylish corridor to a reconfigured Fennell campus, where efficiencies are creating enough space for another 2,000 students as the college grows.
The Mohawk Centre for Learning, Entrepreneurship and Innovation -- fast-tracked from the day it was announced -- is now taking shape and is expected to open in January.
The construction and renovation at Mohawk's main campus expresses a fundamental shift in its philosophy about teaching and learning.
The city college is clustering its faculties and their facilities into what Mohawk is calling "districts."
"We've always been, in my mind, a college that's been eager to try new things, but this is on a massive scale," said vice-president for academic matters, Cheryl Jensen, who's been at Mohawk 25 years.
"The scale of this change and innovation is more than I've ever seen in my time here."
When Rob MacIsaac became president of Mohawk College 15 months ago, he said his priority was to build better places for students to learn, meet and study.
"The old approach was just corridors leading to classrooms," MacIsaac said during a tour of the construction site.
"We haven't encouraged students to stick around by creating these informal, attractive places where students can get together and talk about their projects, talk about what they're learning in class and share ideas."
The symbolism and the substance of the $30-million Mohawk makeover are matched only by the speed with which the project is being carried out.
Most of the money for the expansion and renovation comes from $20 million in provincial education infrastructure money, which requires new construction to be complete by next March.
Queen's Park announced the funding last June and the college broke ground barely two months later. The new Centre for Entrepreneurship, Learning and Innovation is scheduled to open in January, lopping about a year off the time it traditionally takes to complete such a project.
Today there are about 75 tradespeople on site, with the roof expected to be up by the middle of next week.
The centre will be home to the new Cummings Library and Learning Commons -- made possible by a $4.5-million bequest from the late Harold Cummings, a car dealership manager and savvy invester whose daughter is a library technician at the college.
The centre will also have 10 state-of-the-art classrooms and a rooftop patio that overlooks a courtyard and that joins old and new elements of the campus.
Mohawk plans to seek gold certification for the building under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system.
The new structure will be outfitted with smart heating, cooling and lighting systems that adjust according to the number of people in its rooms. A living wall of plants will flank an open staircase through the centre of the building, helping to filter the air naturally.
Smooth concrete walls and floors are to be left exposed, with supporting columns designed to beautify the space, while also holding up the roof - all saving materials, space and money.
The glass curtain of the facade will pull sunlight in through the day and cast softly-coloured light back toward Fennell through the night.
A glassed-in link will join the new wing to the existing campus, where a central corridor is being remade as an interior "Main Street" for student services, which will combine Mohawk offices with retail shopping and coffee shops.
At the same time, the college is shuffling departments over the next two years to consolidate faculties in "real world" clusters that make it easier for students to learn, by creating environments that resemble workplaces instead of classrooms.
"Our facilities have good bones to them, but they're tired," vice-president Jensen said.
As the work proceeds, classes are moving constantly to stay ahead of the renovations.
"It's a tremendously complicated puzzle when you start moving departments around," MacIsaac said. "There's a real domino effect every time you move one department somewhere else."
To get the project done on time and on budget, development manager Ron Taylor said Mohawk pulled together architects, real-estate experts, planners and builders, first to gather ideas from students, faculty and the community and then to find ways to make them real.
"What has been challenging, but exciting, about this project is bringing together all the disparate views," he said.
The project was exciting enough to pull Ron McDonald back to Hamilton from his retirement in Collingwood.
Now 60, he grew up in the Buchanan Park neighbourhood and played on the farm that became the Fennell campus. After a career doing major industrial construction and sending two sons to Mohawk, he was eager to come back to work as senior site superintendent on the new wing.
"I appreciate how much the area has developed," he said, "and how much the city has become a welcoming place for people to live and take advantage of the college."
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