Women celebrate their roles in development of new Civic campus at City BuildHERS event

From left: Melissa Houle from PCL, Laurie Heuff from Ottawa Hydro, Joanne Read from the Ottawa Hospital, and City BuildHERS co-founder Kristen Buter. (Photo by Mia Jensen)
From left: Melissa Houle from PCL, Laurie Heuff from Ottawa Hydro, Joanne Read from the Ottawa Hospital, and City BuildHERS co-founder Kristen Buter. (Photo by Mia Jensen)
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In the past few months, a parking garage has gone up near the intersection of Preston Street and Prince of Wales Drive, the first of several structures that will be built on the site of The Ottawa Hospital’s new campus in the coming years. 

On Tuesday evening, local events platform City BuildHERS brought together many of the women who helped get that parking garage, and all the buildings that will come after it, off the ground. 

“It’s such a game-changing project for the city of Ottawa,” said City BuildHERS co-founder Jennifer Cross, who is also business development manager for Marant Construction. “We wanted to highlight the fact that there are so many women working on this project and give them the opportunity to talk about the different roles that are available.”

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More than 200 women from Ottawa construction, design, development and real estate industries crossed the Rideau River into Gatineau to attend the event, which found a fitting venue in Zibi. The towering industrial events space was outfitted with string lights, a buffet-length charcuterie board and a food truck serving glasses of wine. 

Much like the rest of the Zibi development, the space was still under construction. But the guests, used to these types of sites, had no complaints about the lack of running water, holding on to one of a limited number of wine glasses and braving the cold to track down the port-a-potty outside. 

“Only at a construction event would you find this beautiful space with port-a-potties,” Kristen Buter, City BuildHERS co-founder, joked to the crowd. 

Attendees at the City BuildHERS event on Tuesday evening. (Photo by Mia Jensen)
Attendees at the City BuildHERS event on Tuesday evening. (Photo by Mia Jensen)

Attendees at the City BuildHERS event on Tuesday evening. (Photo by Mia Jensen)

The evening offered guests a behind-the-scenes look into the development process surrounding the new hospital campus over the past decade. 

At 2.5 million square feet on a 50-acre site, the scale of the $2-billion project makes it a point of interest for many women in the construction sectors, according to Cross. 

“We see that the city is going to be built around it and we wanted to highlight that this is a catalyst project,” said Cross. “There are some really interesting things happening in our city that happen to be led by women.”

Two of those women are Joanne Read, executive vice-president and chief planning and development officer for The Ottawa Hospital, and Karen Stockton, the hospital’s executive director of planning and development.

“What we’ve been doing for the last several years, and non-stop, is the internal planning of the hospital,” Stockton said during a presentation about the project’s progress. “We have three major sites and we’re going to deliver care for the next 50 years and look at population growth, age, changes in health-care patterns.”

The new site will include 641 private patient rooms and employ more than 6,000 people. Read discussed the process of working with consultants to design the layout of the rooms, taking into consideration how a wheelchair would maneuver around the space and how low the window needed to be to give patients natural light while lying in bed. She added that the top floor of the cancer centre was used to mocked up possible designs to scale for testing. 

When it comes to the current Civic Campus on Carling Avenue, Read suggested that the plan is to convert it into a retirement or long-term care facility, but, she added, “plans can change.”

Laurie Heuff, vice-president of distribution, system vetting and asset management for Hydro Ottawa, also broke down how the site’s power plant came to be and how it will help the hospital meet its net zero emissions goals. 

“We had to get creative and look at ways we can do things differently,” she said. “What we ended up with is something that’s very similar to the central utility plant that is heating the building we’re all sitting in right now (at Zibi). Those principles of low temperature heating are the ones we brought to the hospital and they are the reason we’re able to achieve much closer to net zero without having to increase the cost.”

The event also featured panellists Elaine Guenette, an engineer for Smith + Andersen; Tessa Kampman, architect and senior project director for BBB architecture Ottawa; Sam Lane, associate sustainable performance discipline lead for Entuitive; and Melissa Houle, manager of special projects for PCL.

It’s the fourth event City BuildHERS has hosted in the two years since it started, Cross added. 

“We started with the mission of bringing women together in all city-building sectors, because what we were realizing is that women tended to only know people that worked either in their office or were in the same field,” she said. “In order to be successful, you need to have a broad network. That’s what we’re looking to do – expand the opportunities for women and build their networks.”

From left: Tessa Kampman from BBB Architecture, Elaine Guenette from Smith + Andersen, and Sam Lane from Entuitive. (Photo by Mia Jensen)
From left: Tessa Kampman from BBB Architecture, Elaine Guenette from Smith + Andersen, and Sam Lane from Entuitive. (Photo by Mia Jensen)
Attendees at the City BuildHERS event on Tuesday evening. (Photo by Mia Jensen)
Panelists discussed their career journeys at the City BuildHERS event Tuesday evening. (Photo by Mia Jensen)
Panelists discussed their career journeys at the City BuildHERS event Tuesday evening. (Photo by Mia Jensen)
The dessert table featuring City BuildHERS cookes. (Photo by Mia Jensen)

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