Aerial view of the Air and Space Museum/KF hangar before construction is completed in mid-November. It is nearing completion on land between the Kelowna International Airport and Highway 97 in Kelowna, British Columbia.Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Agency Media It is nearing completion on land between the Kelowna International Airport and Highway 97 in Kelowna, British Columbia.Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Agency Media Строительство близится к завершению на участке между международным аэропортом Келоуна и шоссе 97 в Келоуне, Британская Колумбия.Фото предоставлено Naturally Wood & Agency Media. Construction is nearing completion on the section between Kelowna International Airport and Highway 97 in Kelowna, British Columbia. Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Agency Media. It is nearing completion on land between Kelowna International Airport and Highway 97 in Kelowna, British Columbia.照片由Naturally Wood & Agency Media 提供照片由Naturally Wood & Agency Media 提供Фото предоставлено Naturally Wood & Agency Media Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Agency Media
While having lunch with an executive at the Four Points Hotel at Kelowna International Airport in British Columbia, KF Aerospace founder Barry Lapointe picked up a red pen, asked a waitress for a sheet of paper, and began drawing a building shaped like an airplane.
It was in May 2017 when he first conceived the concept for the now nearing completion, two-story, 60,000-square-foot KF Aerospace Center museum in Kelow on the eastern shore of Lake Okanagan.
KF Aerospace chief executive Paula Quinn said the busy entrepreneur was quick to give details. “It must have been a lot of wood; it was supposed to look like an airplane; I wanted to build it at the airport,” he said, so basically we… had to work with this little drawing,” Quinn recalls. He wanted to leave behind something that could tell the story of the Okanagan Aviation. ”
Jim Meiklejohn, Senior Partner at Meiklejohn Architects Inc. from Kelowna and the project’s lead architect, said that for the clear aircraft, “the idea of ​​putting people in a hub sandwiched between two hangars came about almost instantly.”
“The challenge was to turn the Lapointe diagram into a complex yet simple architectural form,” Meiklejohn said. “The roof design was based on our architectural sketches” and then StructureCraft modeled it using Grasshopper 3D, a plug-in that runs on the Rhino 3D CAD application, to get the most out of materials to span spaces. “The result is reminiscent of complex curved wing shapes,” Meiklejohn says with spars, trusses and cables.
It took StructureCraft three days to install the large wooden hangar roof panels.照片由Naturally Wood & Agency Media 提供照片由Naturally Wood & Agency Media 提供Фото предоставлено Naturally Wood & Agency Media Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Agency Media
Started in March 2021 for KF Aerospace’s 51st anniversary, the $26 million project, Quinn said, is slated to be completed on budget next month for her 52nd birthday. This is the first museum/hangar project of its size under the Green Building (GC) program, which supports increased use of wood in construction and Canada’s transition to a low-carbon economy, said Kevin Imthorn, vice president and program manager at Sawchuk Developments Co. ., project construction manager in British Columbia. Sawchuk uses the 2010 Construction Management Contract, Canadawide CM standard.
Savchuk completed the first budget for KF Aerospace in May 2020 based on the current site, with the category C budget set by December and the tight deadline open by March 25th.
StructureCraft crews installed 16,856 square feet of cross-laminated timber (CLT) walls, 13,200 square feet of glued-laminated timber (DLT) slabs, 16,000 square feet of DLT curved roof slabs, and 9,102 cubic feet of glulam beams and columns. The steel used for the C-pillar and reinforcement was 101,907 kg (224,667 lb). Grizzly Metal Fab supplied all the steel except for the girders, which were supplied by West Manufacturing in British Columbia.
On average, 12 panels are installed per day with a crew of four and a crane operator.照片由Naturally Wood & Agency Media 提供照片由Naturally Wood & Agency Media 提供Фото предоставлено Naturally Wood & Agency Media Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Agency Media
The spokesperson said KF Aerospace’s sole shareholder, Lapointe, funded the project with support from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), which provided $800,000 when the agreement between NRCan and KF Aerospace was announced in May 2019. Used to support design and construction. Since then, KF Aerospace has received an additional $100,000, one of 30 applicants (10 awarded) from across Canada. However, KF Aerospace’s Quinn estimated the total received to date at $700,000 and confirmed that all payments for three years had not been received as of early February. “This will be the first Canadian building to use a state-of-the-art floor and a tall timber system to accommodate large column spacing – a typical hangar design element – ​​but the system is yet to be completed in this innovative building. ,” NRCan said in a statement last year.
When completed, the structure will include an aviation museum and conference center. “The total carbon benefit generated by the use of a significant amount of wood in this building is estimated at 1,753 metric tons (1,932 tonnes) of carbon dioxide,” NRCan said.
The team developed the concept of a spar truss, similar to the Spitfire of World War II.照片由Naturally Wood & Agency Media 提供照片由Naturally Wood & Agency Media 提供Фото предоставлено Naturally Wood & Agency Media Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Agency Media
The team developed a girder truss concept similar to the World War II Spitfire, said Lucas Epp, vice president and CTO of British Columbia-based structural engineering and timber construction company StructureCraft. “This spar truss runs along the wing, and the rib truss runs perpendicular to the spar truss and forms the shape of the wing,” he said. This Spitfire-spar truss concept “transformed our roof structure into a massive steel beam truss spanning 115-foot-wide glass doors, with timber ribbed trusses to create shape,” Epp said. The structural design team put together some of Lapointe’s favorite mathematical equations to see how to describe the exact shape of the wing’s airfoil to allow them to use that shape.
Epp recalls that in their first meeting with Lapointe, when discussing the development of airfoils from the Wright brothers to supersonic stealth fighters, the team chose the classic NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) airfoil equation. Using the equation, the team applied a computational engineering approach to develop “a parametric model that uses genetic algorithms to optimize and replicate various wing geometries using real-time structural analysis to help create the most structurally efficient truss structure.” said.
The central hub of the “fuselage” is mainly built of DLT and glued laminated lumber and is flanked by two hangar “wings”. The cantilevered DLT roof consist of flat panels lined up on edge along the curved glulam beams.Photo courtesy Naturally Wood & Shawn Talbot The cantilevered DLT roof consists of flat panels lined up on edge along the curved glulam beams.Photo courtesy Naturally Wood & Shawn Talbot Консольная крыша DLT состоит из плоских панелей, выстроенных по краям вдоль изогнутых клееных балок Фото предоставлено Naturally Wood & Shawn Talbot. The DLT cantilever roof consists of flat panels lined up along the edges along curved glulam beams. Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Shawn Talbot. DLT cantilever roofs consist of slabs placed at the edges of curved glulam beams.照片由Naturally Wood & Shawn Talbot 提供照片由Naturally Wood & Shawn Talbot 提供Фото предоставлено Naturally Wood & Shawn Talbot Photo courtesy of Naturally Wood & Shawn Talbot
During development of the project, one of the challenges was to build the center high enough so that travelers could view aircraft on the runway from the second floor without blocking the AST’s private, single-story hangar overlooking the property. “We used drones to establish and confirm the height of the second floor,” Imthorn said.
“This resulted in the second floor being 23 feet higher than the main floor,” Meiklejohn said. The solution, according to Epp, was a spiral free-standing staircase made of CLT wood and double-curved concrete. He noted that the design included wood at the bottom and concrete at the top for added strength and some mass. StructureCraft uses internal radial clamps to bisect a 24′ high, 80′ ladder at its Abbotsford, BC manufacturing facility. There are no similar products in North America or anywhere else in the world.
The fabrication of a hyperbolic CLT forms a structurally independent CLT ladder. Each CLT laminate must be formed and glued to a special fixture. Photo courtesy of StructureCraft
At a 2019 design workshop, the owners, Savchuk, and Vancouver code consultant GHL considered building a hybrid building with a two-hour fire separation between the hangar and the center of the building, including the museum and gallery, but “decided with a larger timber project,” Imthorn said, between hangar and hub had a two-hour break. Lapointe was determined to undertake a large-scale logging project to obtain as much timber as possible from local sources in the province.
To make Lapointe’s idea of ​​a local sourcing program a reality, Imthorn said Sawchuk successfully sourced lumber from British Columbia. When designing four steel hangar doors, two of which are 40 feet wide and 31 feet high and two are 114 feet wide and 31 feet high (a scale that Imthorn claims has never been produced before), the company chose the Minney Powerlift in Apolis .
Rendering of the 60,000-square-foot KFA Center of Excellence, which extends its “wings” from a fuselage-shaped central hub with meeting rooms and offices. Image credit: StructureCraft
Once a building permit is received, it could take three months or more to obtain approvals from YLW, Navigation Canada and Transport Canada to transfer equipment, he said. “Everything takes three times as long as traditional projects,” Imthorn said due to the inherently difficult regulatory environment exacerbated by COVID-19.
Installing a crane can be a challenge, he says. “There is an invisible surface around the airport called an obstacle limitation surface (OLS),” he said. “You cannot allow anything to enter the OLS from the ground: the airspace around the airport must be free from obstacles,” he said.
“We have to make sure that our building is under this OLS and every time we put a crane in place we have to get prior approval from NavCanada and Transport Canada because it will infiltrate the OLS,” he said. This requires careful planning as the pandemic has made contact with officials difficult. Imthorn said the authorization is now complete and paperwork is required to be completed to “confirm” the completion of NavCan and Transport Canada. “They need to know that the building is right next to their airspace… we need to install strobe lights on the roof of the building,” he said.
ENR New England Special Correspondent Joanna Knapschefer has been writing about trends in the design and construction of buildings, bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure for more than a decade. She also features award-winning industry leaders and dives into broader construction issues such as workforce training, worker safety and health, climate change management, and the development of offshore wind and tidal power. Over the past two decades, her articles have appeared in Architectural Record, Business Week, Boston Globe, American Banker, Modern Metal, BusinessNH Magazine, Pittsburgh Magazine, and many other publications. Fluent in Japanese, Joanna taught English and Academic Writing at the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto during her eight years in Japan.
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