Sludge Plant's Appearance Aims for the Sky
Eric McGuinness
The Hamilton Spectator
(Mar 14, 2008)
Architect Philip Smith wants to inject bright colour and striking design into the drab industrial landscape along Burlington Street East.
He plans to give the $160-million Liberty Energy Centre a skin of translucent white and clear plastic panels, creating three angular boxes that will reveal sky-blue machinery inside and glow in the nighttime.
Smith envisions it as "a beacon on the Hamilton skyline that will respect the city's heavy industry while presenting a new, memorable, 21st-century image for the city's future."
That's an ambitious goal for a power plant fuelled by sewage sludge and wood waste, but he sees it as a showcase for a clean-burning, renewable energy project.
"A process like that evokes strong feelings -- they're burning my poop -- but this is a source of energy that will always be there, so let's take advantage of it. I want the building to bring that out."
Smith works in California, where Liberty Energy is based, but says he studied the Hamilton site carefully and considered how the plant would look from street level, from the elevated Industrial Drive and from the Mountain brow.
The big sheds that house much of the heavy industry along the bayfront are cloaked in corrugated steel panels painted rusty red, brown and grey.
Smith plans to stick with corrugated panels, but made of polycarbonate plastic, a mix of translucent white and see-through panels in what he calls a cloud scheme, "as though the building itself were a container for a cloud."
Liberty Energy CEO Wilson Nolan said after meeting with The Spectator editorial board yesterday: "We hold ourselves to a very high standard in execution of our business and want an exceptional-looking building."
The company's environmental screening studies and report were accepted by the Environment Ministry last month. Environment Hamilton and some east Hamilton residents are unhappy the ministry rejected their calls for a more thorough assessment process, but have no further avenue of appeal.
Nolan said he hoped to start building the first of two incinerator units -- he called them reactors -- by this time next year and to start feeding power into the Ontario grid by September 2010, but also said he wouldn't start construction until he has a long-term commitment from one or more municipalities to dispose of their sludge.
Each incinerator is designed to handle sludge produced by a population of two million, about four times the number in Hamilton.
emcguinness@thespec.com
905-526-4650