The Joggins Fossil Centre, a 1,200m2 building on the bluffs above Joggins Beach, forms the gateway for visitors to the finest carboniferous fossil site in the world.
The Joggins facility consists of a mix of administrative / office spaces and special purpose spaces includes museum, research lab, exhibition hall and a multipurpose room.
The facility was built upon a brownfield site reclaimed from the mining industry. Much of the remediation happened on site and there is an on-going landscaping programme, featuring species native to the Acadian Forest region, to enable the eventual naturalisation of the site and reduction of the impact of visitors to the local environment and community.
This project involved the complete design – from concept through to post occupancy on site reviews – of a state of the art LEED Gold facility. The facility includes a mix of administrative and special purpose spaces. ONSA provided full mechanical and electrical design and contract administration services as well as specialized professional services including energy modelling, daylighting simulations, value engineering, cost planning and full M&E commissioning.
Sustainability was a project goal from the start. Difficulty in securing operational funding - as opposed to capital funding - often poses the greatest danger for small interpretive centres. To help alleviate this as much as possible, tight control on building size, ease of maintenance and reliance on alternate energy sources were identified as significant design drivers.
The client was clear from the onset – they wanted an energy efficient structure to minimize the long term operational costs but the technologies incorporated had to be cost effective and low maintenance. The technologies had to be part of the solution – not part of the problem. As well, these elements could not detract from the facility’s core function.
ONSA worked in concert with the entire design team on Joggins to provide holistic design solutions to achieve a similar goal. The Joggins facility will be a LEED Gold project and has achieved an energy consumption usage of 65.4% less than the MNECB.
In order to achieve this, a number of technologies and approaches were tested and modelled, not everything made the cut however. ONSA worked closely with all members of the design team to provide a truly integrated design and all of our solutions were vetted through the users and project stakeholders. The 4 biggest contributors to the exceptional energy efficiency ONSA was able to achieve were: