The McGill Life Sciences Complex is composed of four buildings. The Francesco Bellini (16,770 m2) and cancer research buildings were built as the hub between the Faculty of Medicine's McIntyre Building and the Science Faculty's Stewart Building. The new buildings house elements of both faculties to enhance interaction between disciplines and engender synergy in cancer research, genetics and cell system information. It is a LEED®-registered project for which Silver certification is being sought.
Internally, the new facilities are organized into three distinct components. The first consists of wet and dry bench laboratories and local support spaces such as staff offices, group rooms and equipment rooms, which are generic in nature but designed to allow a degree of needs-based customization. Secondly, there are a series of stacked core equipment spaces, which are extremely flexible in their internal division and with higher structural loading capacity. These areas are electrically and mechanically serviced to allow rapid reconfiguration, with minimum disruption to other activities, as emerging technologies are implemented and introduced into ongoing research. The last building area is a 4,000-m² animal resource centre housing mice, including transgenics, in 22,000 cages. This facility is an SPF Level 3 barrier facility and occupies the two lowest levels of the building with direct, discrete access to the loading dock area. It includes 65 chemistry hoods, 106 biology hoods, confocal microscopes, and instrumentation rooms. The facility's infrastructure is designed to allow the addition in the future of housing for 11,000 cages with minimal impact on the existing mouse population.
Construction challenges
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Site located on the upper slopes of Mount Royal;
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An underground parking garage, which lies beneath most of the site; and
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An extremely tight working area surrounded by occupied premises which required extremely careful management of blasting as well as pedestrian and construction vehicle traffic.