The Student Dormitories & Campus Entry project at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s National Training Academy in Regina (The Depot) is a major expansion to the Depot’s capacity to house cadets. The project includes the construction of three new multi-storey buildings whose primary function is to accommodate 224 cadets, but which also include classrooms and training rooms. Each building has approximately 90,000 square feet of space, with a unique toothed floor plan that accommodates cadet quarters and service spaces to each side of a full height atrium along the spine of the building. The atrium is highlighted by a clerestorey, a feature stair linking bridges that span the atrium at each floor level, and full building height curtain wall glazing at each end.
The buildings have cast-in-place concrete flat slabs supported on concrete columns, with a structural steel framed clerestorey. Because the majority of the structure is to be exposed to view on the interior of the building, the architecture required a clean-finished structural appearance. This necessitated the design of complex structural systems integrated within depth of the flat slabs to provide structural support over a varying and discontinuous grid of column supports. The exterior finish of the building features an extensive red brick façade in keeping with the historic aesthetic of The Depot. As part of its unique secondary function as the campus entry, the first building prominently presents striking, 21-metre high red brick clad gable walls that span over each the end of the building, supported independently on a complex structural steel framework.