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august 2015 | 57 Centre for trades Education & Innovation – Camosun College renderings courtesy camosun college Centre for Trades Education & Innovation – Camosun College by laurie Jones T he highly anticipated opening of Camosun College's Centre for Trades Education & Innovation (CTEI) in the fall of 2015 has been a long time com- ing. The 80,000-square-foot, state-of- the-art facility in Victoria, B.C. features expanded spaces for current trades training courses such as welding, sheet metal and metal fabrication, automo- tive, heavy-duty mechanics and nauti- cal training. With increased space avail- able, the newly added Marine Trades section will encompass Women in Trades programs as well as Aboriginal Trades training. Camosun College is comprised of two campuses – the Lansdowne Campus, located in central Victoria and the Interurban campus in rural Saanich, 15 minutes from downtown. For years the Interurban facility has been the main trades training campus but with a boom in the need for trained workers, and the interest of both men and women in tak- ing the variety of courses, the old facili- ties were bursting at the seams. That is about to change. "We are right sizing our institution and making improvements to create a 21st-century learning facility with room to grow," says Eric Sehn, Camosun College Dean of Trades & Technology. "Student demand for trades courses has been high in recent years, to the point that we are running out of classrooms, but we also have to be able to marry student interest with industry demand. It's a balancing act to ensure that we address the labour market data, which is produced provin- cially through WorkBC. This also helps us look at the possibility of new trades to develop curriculum options for addi- tional trades programming." Twenty years ago, Camosun College constructed a series of outbuildings that were intended for temporary solu- tions. "We have been using those build- ings because we just didn't have room to place everyone," says Sehn. "Now stu- dents will be able to transfer from those old structures to the John Drysdale and Jack White buildings, two long-standing trades training facilities on campus. Eventually the outbuildings will then be demolished." Designing the CTEI was a welcome challenge for Bruce Knapp, managing principal – Vancouver, and his team at B+H Architects. "The Camosun project was a great opportunity to showcase best practices right now in the design of trades training facilities," he says. "It's a really interesting mix of things because this involves moving many compo- nents from the John Drysdale and Jack White buildings to brand new space. In addition to classrooms, the facility has a 4,300-square-foot atrium with a 1,400-square-foot mezzanine for seat- ing or studying. We designed this space to show off all the trades that happen in the building. There's a lot of exposed, welded steel and we've left connec- tions exposed in all the beams and the systems so instructors can take the stu- dents through the building and show how things were done in best practice format. It's like a living lab." Outside of the main building, the yards are an important component of the learning path. "A lot of materials are stored and vehicles are in the middle of

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