Michael Wilson
For the Gazette
The University of Waterloo’s Robert Shipley, director of UW’s Heritage Resources Centre, recently sent a memo to Ian Wilson, director of the Digital Media Institute, expressing not only the local, but provincial and national importance, of the Cooper site and buildings. He also outlined some of the significant “economic advantages of adaptive reuse, energy conservation issues, cultural heritage landscape design potential, and creative community and cultural heritage planning opportunities.”
To further support this sensible thinking, I thought it timely to mention some of the attributes and information about the existing building(s) that should be made available to the public.
For those interested in the detailed history of the CNR Centre, please see Dean Robinson’s book, Railway Stratford, published in 1989 by The Boston Mills Press; “For three times as long as it has been called the Festival City, Stratford was known as a Railway Centre.”
Imagine the expanse, the steel superstructure painted white, sunlight streaming through vast skylights illuminating interior public, academic and assembly floor spaces, a new, polished layer of heated concrete covering the once busy locomotive repair shop floor. New buildings, floor levels and spaces inserted in dramatic, but ordained hierarchy.
The principal bay, fondly known as the Erecting Shop is 70’ wide; 50’ tall and 790’ uninterrupted in length. Columns on 22’ centers sporting structural capacity of the former 200 tonne crane – operable until the mid-1990s – is flanked by the annex to the west, some 50’ wide by 585’ in length, and to the east by two floor areas of 65’ by 790’, and 40’ x 585’.
Simply put – not including the Tender Shop recently destroyed by fire, nor the wooded, structurally failed ‘smith shop’ – there lies 159,000 square feet on the grade, plus another 23,000 square feet second floor or mezzanine.
Within these vast ceilings, providing floor systems with flexible and generous floor-to-floor heights, this number can grow to as much as 500,000 square feet under the same roof. As for adding new buildings on site, the potential is far greater and begs thorough examination and lots of imagination.
After graduating from University of Toronto School of Architecture, I was fortunate to work the closing shift at what was then Cooper Energy to assist in the assembly of the four Rolls Royce and Olympus, which were gas fired back-up generators for the Darlington Nuclear plant in 1984. In the late 1970s, working in the field for Cooper Energy helped with tuition and my hobby of competitive motocross.
Now working as an architect for the past 25 years, watching the gradual deterioration of the CNR Centre has been difficult. In 1995, our firm conducted a feasibility study for Livent (Garth Drabinsky), with the idea of creating a theatrical scenery shop (inexpensive fully operational industrial space, not to mention access to the skilled talent already well established here), but at the time the presented occupancy was not favorably received by the city’s building and planning department, as continued industrial use was discouraged. Mr. Drabinsky went on to revitalize two important theatres in Times Square in New York City.
Prior to this, in 1992 and 1993, I worked closely and very hard with Tom Patterson to try to encourage corporate use or sale of the property. After a series of sequential commercial offers appeared, this work was cut short after the deal closed in February of 1996 between the City of Stratford and 1101644 Ontario Ltd.
Since then, the salvaging, fires and deterioration – not to mention Ministry of Environment clearance requirements – have changed the asset-to-liability equation to a near zero monetary value. But there still lies a seemingly hidden potential, to some, and certain cultural value. It is with applause that I welcome our mayor’s and city council’s efforts and ownership again for the site as the new home of the University of Waterloo Stratford Institute.
It is with the greatest sincerity that I ask the decision makers at both the University of Waterloo and City of Stratford to look very carefully at the means of developing this site.
The ground contamination of the site is not without its challenges and liabilities; The building, however, is not. It must be made clear that working with this structure has practical possibility as well as unprecedented importance to Stratford’s prosperity.
To learn some of the details to the idea, please look in next week’s column.
Michael Wilson graduated in 1984 from the School of Architecture in Toronto. Having experience internationally, regionally and in private practice locally since 1993, Michael is an expert in adaptive re-use of historical buildings, for both commercial and institutional use, as well as a specific knowledge of educational, ecclesiastical, musical and theatrical assembly spaces.
