The new home of SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences, Blusson Hall has many environmentally-friendly and sustainability features. (Sherry Dong/The Epoch Times)

Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University opened its greenest of green buildings this week.

Built by local architects, Blusson Hall is the new home of SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences and has many environmentally-friendly and sustainability features.

“Blusson Hall significantly enhances SFU's legacy of educational leadership shaped by architectural innovation and excellence,” said Dr. Michael Stevenson, president of SFU.

Built at a cost of $56.9 million, the exterior architecture of the 12,000 square-metre facility is a U-shaped three-story complex built around a courtyard. The inside features tiers of offices, classrooms and seminar rooms, a computing lab and lecture theatre and open-plan wet and dry labs.

Stevenson said the “magnificent” new building reenergizes the principles that defined the original architecture of the SFU campus.

He added that Blusson Hall will deliver “integration and cross-fertilization rather than isolation of programmes, the facilitation of social interaction and intellectual interdisciplinarity, respect for the environment and innovation in environmental technology, [and] the recovery and recognition of tradition in a radically contemporary idiom.”

Blusson Hall, Simon Fraser University’s greenest building. (Courtesy of SFU)

Named after Stewart and Marilyn Blusson who contributed $12 million to the project, the building exceeds the Silver Standards of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), a green building construction reference standard.  

“For just about every aspect, we thought about the issue of being sustainable and with a green thought in our mind to make this building that is performing in that way,” said Lee Gavel, Chief Facilities Officer at the SFU.

Gavel says the building features a green roof (planted) with large tanks that store underground water to irrigate the green roof, along with solar shading designed to cut down solar gain of the building to lower the energy required for cooling.

It also uses sustainable harvested wood products and radiant-floor heating and is designed to take in abundant natural light.

Gavel says the building is designed to use less power than a conventional laboratory scientific research building would take.

“That's both through the behaviour of the occupants and the way they design research equipment and use it, but also in the way that we control the lighting with automatic digital control so that it's turned off at night and when there are no occupants … so that  it's very energy conservative in those kinds of ways,” he said. 

On the afternoon of the opening on Wednesday, an inaugural health symposium was held that focused on the challenges of children’s healthy development. Speakers included Dr. Fraser Mustard, founding member of McMaster University’s medical school, and Bruce Lanphear and Heather Waddell, both of the SFU faculty of health sciences.

Established in 2004, the Faculty of Health and Sciences focuses on population and public health, and conducts research in the areas of infectious diseases, environmental health, mental health and addiction, as well as global health.

“It’s the only health sciences program in the country to offer such a comprehensive interdisciplinary education,” said SFU Faculty of Health Sciences dean John O’Neil in a news release.

The Province provided $34.5 millions to fund the project. The rest of the funding was provided by the university and philanthropists’ donations.  

Additional Reporting by Sherry Dong