FOCAL POINT
• Named after Canada’s leading paleontologist Dr. Philip Currie.
• Built to LEED Gold standard. A triple-glazed zinc roof creates an energy-efficient and sustainable building envelope to handle the area’s temperature extremes. The entire building can be heated and cooled by a displacement ventilation system, located under the museum’s concrete floor. • The building’s design “draws on an abstraction of the paleontological
excavation experience with two massive retaining walls of poured concrete and gabions pushing back the earth to reveal the main gallery wall,” says the museum website. • Gallery spaces are angled onto seven support beams made from pine beetle timber. The exposed beams and connection nodes put the building’s skeleton on display, just like the dinosaur skeletons that will be on display inside. • Innovative 3-D modelling was used to design the complex geometry and angles of the nodes. This involved laminating plywood sheets together and connecting the pieces with 80 screws at different angles and lengths. The screws — up to 19 mm in diameter and 1,200 mm long — act similar to rebar in concrete. A total of 1,250 pieces were fabricated from 250 sheets of plywood. For a detailed explanation of this groundbreaking process, visit structurecraft.com. • Interactive displays will take visitors on a 360-million-year journey. In addition to dinosaur and special exhibit galleries, the museum includes a 70-seat theatre, two classrooms, an education centre, and an oil and gas wing. • Visitors can watch paleontologists preparing specimens in the museum’s lab and research centre. • PCL Construction was awarded a 2014 Alberta Construction Award in the under $50-million category for its work on the project. Teeple Architects was also recognized by Azure , an architecture and design magazine, which named the building one of the world’s top 10 projects of 2014.
-museum images courtesy Philip J. Currie Museum
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