I.S.Vox : the voice of "indoor systems": Space Planning

Sep 24^th Field Trip

333 Main Street

MTS Tower

On this field trip we have visited the MTS and Bank of Montreal building structures. The engineer on duty explained us how the systems are working and took us for the tour around the tower. The structure has 23 floors and is divided into blocks, which is preferred by the types of businesses located within the building. The tower provides working and meeting spaces for about 600 people.

It was valuable for us, as future designers, to understand and see the real systems that are needed to maintain such a structure. It is amazing how much space and maintenance they require. It is important to plan enough space and choose the right location for all the systems from the first time or at the beginning of the design project since alterations and removal of such systems later might cost a fortune or be not possible at all. It was interesting to find out that the location and characteristics (such as heat, noise or power consumption) of such systems might be key elements influencing some of the main design decisions. Nowadays this particular building’ systems require tremendous amount of space and maintains. Such systems include heating, cooling and ventilation, fire sprinklers, and diesel and battery backup generators. Their placement is determined by the placement of the building in relation to sunshine or wind. Besides that the interiors still have to be divided into zones to help balance the building and provide optimal and equal level of comfort for all of its occupants. The images above illustrate some of the volumes systems of the MTS tower require to sustain well-being and work performance of the people working in the building. This systems do consume a big amount of energy, that is why when appropriate they might be shut down or regulated in other ways to save some energy (for example for the night when the building is not occupied the heating might be turned down and few hours before the start of the work day turned up again).

People are still needed to perform such tasks as regulating systems’ energy consumption and performance, as well as to be there to immediately solve any technical problems. Such professionals are located and also work full-time inside the building they are looking after. On this field trip it was sad for us to observe that in the building where beautiful offices and huge corridors were designed, there was no space planned for the building engineers. Storage spaces were all they had available to adapt for their work spaces. They work in a small room in one of the noisiest parts of the building, with no natural light or wheelchair access. Designers goal is to make sure their design after it is built would treat all the building’s occupants equally, which is not observed in the MTS Tower.

One of the most exiting parts of our building tour was visiting its roof. Here we could see some of the “extensions” of building systems, which also took lots of space and were quite noisy. One might think that it should be no problem since nobody uses or cares about the roof space anyway… but while we were there taking pictures of the beautiful views of Winnipeg Downtown and The Forks, the building engineer mentioned that if we came few weeks later we would see the most beautiful picture of the year from this roof with all the autumn colours... He also noted that people who work in the building in autumn often ask him to take them to the roof to take pictures! That’s when I thought WHY doesn’t anybody use the roof space? There are so many businesses in the world that make money on just providing views that people are always exited to experience. Lots of work and money might be needed to adapt the roof space to make it comfortable, safe and suitable for people to gather in or use as a space to go for a break, take time away from the office headaches… there could be a green space on this roof...