Old Westinghouse factory to rise again
Part of an Innovation Park new expansion
It’s a “fixer-upper,” Ty Shattuck jokes by way of understatement, about 606 Aberdeen, as a group of us stand amid the broken pavement and weedy overgrowth at the threshold of this hulking boxy carcass of industrial bygone-ry.
The building, which actually was in use as metal recycling plant as recently as a few years ago, is kind of ghostly with neglect, from the crumble and cracks and chipping to the toothless mouth of broken windows in a row at the top floor.
Shattuck, CEO of McMaster Innovation Park, leads us inside. While there are more signs of dereliction — rust and dankness and big divots out of the floor and walls — there is also much that is impressive. Massive columns holding things up, and epic bulkheads of concrete and rebar. It feels a bit like a premonition of something grander to come.
But nothing could have prepared me for what unfolds as we walk into the two enormous “bays” that flow from the back of 606 Aberdeen. These sunlight-drenched, central station-sized expanses of high, enclosed open space combine qualities of a greenhouse with classic assembly line factory design, airplane hangar chic and steampunk apocalypse, so that even in their broken down disrepair they preserve a great beauty, all glass, steel columns and roof trusses.
You can imagine this all as the set of a movie and indeed, I’m told by the building manager, they have been used as such.
But the “movie” they’re going to be housing, in the sweeping, far
reaching vision of McMaster Innovation Park and McMaster University is going to be a vast epic story of our times. The whole complex — 606 Aberdeen and the glass warehouse — will be a focal part of a broad far-flung laboratory and research park integrated with the larger environment and community; among other things that will go on there will be the work of something, Karen Mossman tells me, is being called the Global Nexus for Pandemic and Biological Threats.
“This (our current pandemic) is not going to be the last,” says Mossman, a McMaster University virologist and a key figure in The Glass Warehouse project. There are so many disciplines involved in the understanding and response to these threats, from biologists to social scientists, researchers and health care people, that “we need somewhere to coalesce.”
And so McMaster, drawing on 15 years of world-class research in infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance, and McMaster Innovation Park are taking the international lead.
The plans for these buildings, once part of the huge Westinghouse presence in Hamilton, are monumental. The 606/Glass Warehouse project, once operational (probably in about three years), will feature 300,000 square feet of laboratory, research, meeting space and amenities, including dining. “It will be the equivalent of a 30-story building, horizontally,” says Shattuck. He compares it to a big bank tower in Toronto lying on its side.
Since 2019, design firm mcCallumSather began working with McMaster Innovation Park on a feasibility study for the adaptive reuse of these spaces.
“As both the gateway and heart of the campus, we sought thoughtful solutions, sensitive to how the two environments interact with each other and the surrounding campus,” says Christina Karney, mcCallumSather associate.
The concept drawings that she and Drew Hauser, another mcCallumSather architect, show during the tour are gorgeous, all the more so for integrating so much of the character and recognizable features of the space as it exists now, and there are hopes they can preserve such treasures as the big built-in crane and the still extant pulley system whereby the great banks of ceiling windows can be opened.
It will be, says Shattuck, a truly “international place-making” development for Hamilton.