Francis Winspear Center for Music
Compared to some of the finest halls, Edmonton’s Francis Winspear Center for Music has become the venue of choice for major artists and concert promoters from around the world because of the center’s superior acoustics.
The Francis Winspear Center was completed in 1997 at a cost of $40M and presented two unique engineering challenges. The first challenge was to prevent hydrocarbon vapours from contaminated soil beneath the building from entering the concert hall and therefore, designing a vapour extraction system with mechanical components for long-term control and performance monitoring. Secondly, stringent acoustic design criteria allowing music to be performed “unplugged” required innovative mechanical design of the heating, ventilating and air conditioning system in the main concert hall environment.
