Shelter Industries Custom Modular Housing

Modular builder Shelter Industries Inc. has supplied a 10,000 square foot, two-storey building complex for Sunnyhill Health Centre for Children in Vancouver, BC, that provides approximately 30 administrative and clinical offices.

The project was notable for a stringent requirement of extremely minimal vibration in a first-floor clinical lab area, called the Shriners Gait Lab.  Six CCD video cameras are suspended on a frame running near the top of the wall.  The cameras use reflected light to record a patient’s physical movement while walking across plates in the floor that record force.  The tests are used for assessment and diagnosis of surgical procedures

Shelter achieved the vibration isolation requirements through the separation of the Lab’s floor area from the surrounding building areas, and the use of vibration-isolating rubber gaskets.

“The cameras are subjected to diminished vibration, which is essential for our analyses in the lab,” comments Alec Black, Director of the Gait Lab.

The 20 modules comprising the building were constructed in Shelter’s factory and delivered to the building site, which greatly minimized noise, disruption and dust at the hospital. Craned into place on a perimeter concrete foundation over a two-day period, the complex is connected with an existing hospital building through an all-steel bridge constructed by Shelter.

The Project Coordinator for Sunnyhill Health Centre, Erica Guliker, salutes the “good quality of construction” and the shorter completion time compared with site-built.  The design, says Guliker, represented a partnership between architect of record Matti Saar and in-house designers at Shelter.  “I was pleased to work with Shelter — they really made it happen,” she says.

Matti Saar, of M. Saar Architecture in Vancouver, considers the Sunnyhill complex a “good example of a very successful modular building. The quality is better than stick-built because it was made in a factory and because the quality control is much more stringent.”

Saar maintains that pre-conceptions about modular have discouraged building owners from realizing that modular buildings generally offer higher quality, and are particularly suited to health and school facilities.

Shelter’s quality-control process took place under its ISO 9001 certification.