Flynn Wins Gold Award from VRCA

Flynn received the Gold Award in the Director’s Trade category for our work on the Coast Capital Savings (CCS) Building in Vancouver. The award was presented at the Vancouver Regional Construction Association Awards of Excellence. Congratulations to everyone who took part in this monumental project and win!

About the winning project:

In collaboration with General Contractor Ledcor, Coast Capital Savings was a design-assist project that included roofing, glazing, and metals.

The complexity of this project required innovative thinking from the start. With both positive and negative slopes, vents were designed to work both with and against gravity. With opposing slopes coming together at 90-degree angles, sealed glazing units had to be reversed depending on the slope direction.

Custom glass units with hidden mechanical fasteners were made to suit the design which featured structural silicone joints with no pressure plates or cover caps. Custom designs are essentially everywhere, in fact, 62 new custom extrusions were created to accommodate the shape of the building, and a two-story corner mock-up was produced to test fit and performance.

On our road to success, we encountered many challenges along the way. We identified a major leak in the curtain wall system which was not caught in the design and mock-up process. We immediately notified Ledcor and the building owner and made every resource available to deliver the high-performing curtain wall system as promised. Our commitment to doing the right thing, one of our collective values and beliefs that make up our culture “The Flynn Way,” has strengthened our relationship with Ledcor and the building owner, and is a point of pride for everyone involved.

In addition to an aggressive schedule, another major challenge during installation was the lack of physical space to work in. The site’s small construction footprint was bordered by a light rail line and one of the city’s busiest roads meaning both material handling and installation had to be creatively managed to ensure safe and timely work. The assembly, packaging, and shipping of each of the glazing modules had to be carefully planned to follow a pre-established installation pattern. Each spandrel panel was made of one piece of glass with three different frit colours. Adding further to the intricacy of sequencing was the fact that some panels were single glazed or laminated depending on the building elevation.

Another challenge involved access. The one of a kind glazing system was pre-glazed, and the finished work had to be completed from the exterior of the building. We solved the problem with specially designed swing stages, while some areas remained accessible by bosun chairs only.

We are proud to share that Flynn’s crews experienced no lost time incidents on the project! Way to go!