Through your eyes photo contest winners

Submitted by Sabrina Tong, Tradeshow/Photography Coordinator


1st Place: Ryan Shippelt

Every year Stantec holds a photo contest for employees to gather the best project and stock photography possible.

2nd Place: Dean Mullin



We are pleased to announce the winners of the 6th Annual "Through Your Eyes" Photography Contest. First place is awarded to Ryan Shippelt of the Red Deer, Alberta, office, who submitted his electrifying stock photo. Second place goes to Dean Mullin of the Calgary (25th Street), Alberta, office, for his photo of "Crowfoot LRT Station". In third place is Amber Coleman of the Raleigh, North Carolina, office, for her breathtaking stock photo. Fourth place goes to Hope Green of the St. John's (Torbay Rd), Newfoundland, office, for her stock photograph, and David Fech of the Edmonton, Alberta, office, takes fifth place for the "South Light Rail Transit Extension-Southgate Transit Centre" night shot. 

3rd Place:  Amber Coleman



Congratulations to all the winners!

 

This year we received an overwhelming number of images—over 580 images that represented stock and project photography!
The “Through Your Eyes” Photography Contest was created to tackle Stantec’s ongoing need for great photography of all types - projects, people at work, and evocative stock images that capture the tremendous range of assignments we undertake for our clients. They are an essential component of our image library, which now numbers more than 65,000 photographs and illustrations.

 

4th Place:  Hope Green

At the same time, it’s a fun way to encourage and challenge the shutter bugs on our staff. Over the years, dozens of our colleagues have heeded the call, heading off each summer camera in hand, and wowing us with the results. The fruits of their labours are shared in project documents, marketing literature, and on our traditional and social media sites.

5th Place: David Fech

Check out all 12 shortlisted images

















Turn your energy hog into a high performance gazelle

Submitted by Klaas Rodenburg

On September 29, 2010, an integrated team of sustainable building experts from Stantec showed the folks at the Urban Green Expo at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City how to turn their energy hog into a high-performance building (or gazelle).

Currently, 70 percent of NYC's carbon emissions come from buildings versus 33 percent in other places. Emissions from buildings are much higher compared to transportation emissions because New Yorkers walk and use public transport. Over the next 5 to 10 years, New York City will have hundreds of thousands of buildings that will require energy upgrades, and this is where our team comes in.

The theme of the Urban Green Expo was “Pushing the Envelope,” and our panel showed how the performance of new and existing hospitals can be significantly improved using low “energy” solutions such as shallow floor plans, high-performance envelopes, mixed-mode ventilation, decoupled ventilation/thermal systems, high-efficiency energy recovery, daylighting, and passive technology. We chose to focus on hospitals because this building type has virtually all kinds of heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and electrical systems and operates 24/7, making it one of the highest energy users among building types. So if you can make it work here, you can make it work anywhere.

Our panel included a healthcare architect, an engineer well versed in American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) standards, a daylighting design expert, and a landscape architect who specializes in green roofs. We started our presentation talking about how using an integrated design process and attention to form can improve function, performance, and occupant well-being. We also discussed the use of windows and views of nature to significantly improve occupant well-being and, at the same time, reduce electrical power use through daylight harvesting. Finally, we talked about the benefits of green roofs as an integral part of the building envelope, helping to reduce the “heat island” effect, absorbing stormwater runoff, creating a quieter environment, and demonstrating the healing power of plants. We had some interesting dialogue toward the end of the presentation about the importance of daylighting to patient recovery and the general lack of good data on building performance within the industry.

The future of energy upgrades of all buildings in the United States will be determined by the progress of greening US building codes. ASHRAE Standard 189.1 and International Green Construction Code IgCC are leading the way, but much more work needs to be done.

Proud to be one of Canada's Top 100 Employers

The Top 100 Employers competition aims to identify companies and organizations that are among the best places to work and that lead their industries in attracting and retaining employees. The competition looks at what companies have to offer employees in areas such as physical environment, benefits, training and development, environmental leadership, and community involvement.

Being named a top employer in any country in which we operate is an achievement that we can all—from our office locations in London, England, to Yellowknife, North West Territories—be proud of. It reinforces what we have been saying for many years: that we strive to be a good place to work and to be a socially responsible company. This achievement also underscores our belief that working as “One Team” contributes to employee satisfaction by providing opportunities to share talents and skills on challenging projects across our organization.

Related
Canada's Top 100
The Globe and Mail

An archaeologist’s week: from bison butchery to nautical disasters

Submitted by Butch Amundson, senior archaeologist & principal (Saskatoon, SK)

Life as an archaeologist is full of surprises, and a recent week I had on the job is a perfect example for the diverse types of projects I get involved with working as an archaeologist at Stantec.

The week began with finally getting a crew out to dig a 6,000-year-old bison-butchering site near Saskatoon. I write “finally” because we had a three-month delay due to unprecedented rains this spring and summer. One of the many variables in an archaeologist’s schedule is the weather, and we’ve certainly had a lot of it lately.

Using the EM38 at the Loreburn graveyard

Once the crew was settled in to the task, my colleague in Winnipeg, David McLeod, and I headed down to a little graveyard near Loreburn, Saskatchewan, to rediscover the location of unmarked graves on behalf of the descendants of those buried there. As is typical of so many country graveyards on the prairies, grass fires have swept through and burned off the wooden grave markers, leaving the number and location of graves a mystery.

McLeod, as he prefers to be called, uses an EM38 electrical conductivity metre to find conductivity anomalies in the subsurface that may indicate the presence of grave shafts. Meanwhile, I use a high-resolution, differential GPS to map the features of the graveyard and calibrate the grid that McLeod is using to do the EM38 survey. The final product will be a map of possible grave locations in the context of the existing grave markers and, hopefully, happy relatives of the Finnish homesteaders buried there. On a more practical note, our work on identifying unmarked graves helps to avoid accidental disturbances when new ones are dug.

On the hunt for the SS City of Medicine Hat

Finally, to top off my week, I attended, with my family in tow, the world premiere of the documentary film “The Last Steamship: The Search for the SS City of Medicine Hat.” The feature-length film chronicles an underwater archaeology project I was involved with in the South Saskatchewan River, trying to recover evidence of “Saskatoon’s greatest nautical disaster.”

This week it’s back to reality: coding invoices, writing proposals, and completing reports. But that’s OK because it’s raining—again.

For more photos of Stantec’s archaeologists at work, visit our Facebook page.

Why work in healthcare?

Submitted by Bruce Raber, vice president & healthcare practice leader

The New Laguna Honda Hospital & Rehabilitation Center

San Francisco, California

We’ve recently launched plans to significantly increase our exposure to the healthcare sector with the acquisition of Anshen + Allen in San Francisco and the planned addition of Burt Hill of Pennsylvania. With these major developments in the works I’ve been asked, why is Stantec so confident in the healthcare market?

There are a few reasons for our decision to focus our attention on healthcare.

It’s a very large market

Every community of any size in the world has some sort of healthcare facility. There are thousands and thousands of facilities that are in need of renovation, redevelopment, or need to be built in growing cities and towns. Healthcare facilities such as hospitals, labs, research centers, and doctor’s offices are vital pieces of infrastructure. A hospital is the one building type that every member in the community will use, which means there is a lot of opportunity for design work for firms like us.

Growing demand for everything associated with health and wellness

The world’s population is aging and the baby boomers are reaching the age where they will need more care. Nearly every day you will find stories in the newspaper related to healthcare, whether it’s a new treatment or drug, new government programs, or medical breakthrough. Healthcare infrastructure is the backbone for all of this. Research, treatment, care – it all happens within the walls of a facility. We help provide those facilities. Right now demand for healthcare facilities far exceeds what’s available.

Additionally, the demand for design services is ongoing. While we design for future flexibility in all our healthcare work, there is still an ongoing need for maintenance and renovations. As technologies and processes change and improve, buildings need to be adapted to accommodate those changes. This leads to ongoing relationships between us and the facility operators and opportunities for us to provide services over the life of the building.

Funding can be a challenge, but it’s achievable

Just because there is a demand doesn’t mean it can be funded. However, healthcare is typically a funding priority for governments. It needs to be funded in order to help ensure the safety and well being of the population. We were seeing money being invested in healthcare even during the economic downturn and now that there is a recovery happening (albeit a slow one) we feel that healthcare is one of the first markets that will see increased investment globally. Public-private-partnerships (P3s) are playing in increasingly important role and have proven to be an effective model for allowing governments to build the facilities needed.

Better design can also help. Designing around processes that doctors and nurses use for common tasks and technology can mean we can construct smaller buildings which can lead to cost savings. This is why Stantec has Registered Nurses on staff to help make the building functional for those that use it day in and day out. Energy efficient technologies and design improvements also can reduce the long term operating costs of a facility. Good design is helping healthcare facilities become less expensive to build and operate and can assist in the long term viability of the buildings.

Healthcare projects can attract people

I do a regular survey of my employees that work on healthcare projects and in that survey I ask people why they like working on healthcare projects. The vast majority answer, “because they’re working on projects that make a difference.”

Healthcare work is a specialty and people do it because they are passionate about working on something that helps others. One of the reasons we, as a company, began focusing on this sector was because we already had good experience that we sort of grew into over the years. By growing to be one of the top firms in the world for healthcare facility design we are in a better position to attract the best and the brightest in our industry. People that want to work on these types of projects for altruistic reasons are more likely to look for work with Stantec because they can do this type of work full time and be provided with a consistent stream of exciting projects.

What makes the healthcare sector an attractive one for Stantec is that it’s a market that offers our staff opportunities to work on rewarding projects and fill a need in the world that makes a difference to the communities where we work.

Related
The new Laguna Honda Hospital that Stantec worked on was recently opened in San Francisco. This video explains why the work we do in healthcare is so important.