Calgary, Alberta
Design + Compassion
For anyone fighting cancer, a hospital becomes more than a treatment facility. It becomes a home away from home — for patients and their families. It brings optimism with groundbreaking research and new treatments being developed just footsteps away. And when it’s done right, it provides hope, warmth, and comfort when they’re needed most.
Since the early 2000s, Calgary’s Tom Baker Cancer Centre has been stretched beyond its capacity. With the city’s aging and growing population, the Alberta government invested $1.4 billion to build the new Calgary Cancer Centre. When it opens in 2024, it will become the new home base for cancer patients and families in Calgary and southern Alberta.
Teams of professional engineers, regulated by Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA), approached their work on this historic project with compassion and empathy. They took the challenge to heart to design and construct a building that is a part of the fight against cancer, not just the hospital where it happens.
Mark Wallace, APEGA member and senior mechanical engineer at Dialog played a significant role. He and his team ensured thousands of rooms and specialized areas are equipped with life-saving and sustaining services, such as oxygen, medical gases, and uninterruptible power sources. There is zero margin for error in this work considering how many lives will be impacted for decades to come.
“Services in this building are orders of magnitude higher than other buildings,” says Mark. “These are services that will fuel all the equipment and treatments that patients, their doctors, nurses, and caretakers need.”
For context, these mission-critical services represent almost half of the entire cost of the project, which, according to Mark, is practically unheard of in any other kind of building. With this monumental responsibility, the team’s first challenge was figuring out the overall scale of mechanical equipment needed to service the building. Then, they would need to figure out where it all goes.
“We ended up devoting an entire double-height floor to house all of the service equipment,” says Mark. “It’s strategically placed in the building so we could effectively run all the services to every area. This also gave us the ability to have a high level of control on the services, which is absolutely crucial for services in cancer treatment.”
This floor is the heartbeat of the building. It provides patients, doctors, and researchers the tools they need at every stage of the journey with cancer. While they’re skillfully hidden behind walls and on an entire floor that the elevators glide right past, these services are essential.
“Things like medical gas, power, humidification, heating, cooling, ventilation, electrical distribution, pneumatic tubing are centralized on this floor,” Mark explains. “Considering what patients and their families are going through, the types of procedures happening here, the variety of needs and specializations, it’s extremely important to get this all right.”
Once the services were installed in the mechanical floor, Mark and his team needed to weave them through the building around floor plans, spaces, and systems that other engineers worked meticulously to design. This is a challenge in any building, but in a service-heavy hospital like the Calgary Cancer Centre, it becomes far more testing for the engineers in charge.
Every element of the building’s engineering was carefully thought out with one goal in mind: to give cancer patients and their families what they need in their battle with cancer. From state-of-the-art treatment and family-centric healing areas to the services that help bring hope and comfort, professional engineers regulated by APEGA have designed the Calgary Cancer Centre with purpose — in a way that will change lives for decades to come.