2011 Canadian Terrazzo Award | Terrazzo, Tile & Marble Association of Canada
2011 Project of the Year | Terrazzo, Tile & Marble Association of Canada
This terrazzo floor installation is nearly 40,000 sq. ft. in size for the University of Alberta’s Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science (CCIS). This new, state-of-the-art facility brings together students, professors and researchers from multiple fields of Science: Integrated Earth and Landscape Management, Nanostructures and New Materials, Resource Geosciences, Chemical Biology and Proteomics, Planetary Dynamics, and Physics. The floor is a ten-color epoxy terrazzo design depicting all of the sciences, from a plesiosaur to neurons, fractals, subatomic particles, and stars. The divider strip, which is the line work in my design, runs over 7 miles in length and more than 20,000 liters of epoxy was poured (5,000+ gallons). The plesiosaur by itself is 300 ft. in length. The terrazzo contains aggregates crushed from windshield glass, mining byproducts and various marble.
Like education itself, this floor offers a sense of journey and discovery. My design concept began as a response to the geometry of the planned built environment and the geometry of the research environment, with an emphasis on the open floor plate design and multiple points of view expressed in the architecture, multiple entries and passageways, and the plan view siting along the campus North Quad.
The gesture of connecting interior to exterior spaces is critical to the design: One could look out the North Theatre windows to the nearby North Saskatchewan River and recognize the link to fluid dynamics and see the river’s flow echoed visually in the floor; or connect the formation of ice crystals on the window outside as a diffusion limited aggregation in the form of a fractal in the floor. Or in another section, one can make the connection between the pattern in the floor and the symmetry witnessed in the seasonal migration of a flock of birds outside. When this happens, the world and its simple gestures become a much more meaningful and rich environment to discover in this moment of recognition.
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest…a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~ Albert Einstein
Artist: Scott Parsons
Architects: ONPA, Edmonton, OT and Flad, Madison, WI
Terrazzo Strip: Franklin Terrazzo, Chatham, ON
Terrazzo: ANTEX Western, Edmonton, OT
General Contractor: PCL, Edmonton, OT
See the installation process under News.
