GNWC 2007 Year in Review
2007 has been a year of transition and building for Great Northern Way Campus. Most significantly GNWC opened the new Centre for Digital Media and welcomed our first student group into the Masters of Digital Media Program. For the first time ever, graduates will receive degrees bearing the emblems and seals of all four partner institutions.

BCIT's Centre for the Advancement of Green Roof Technology (CAGRT) has been a leading research facility for green roof technology since 2002. Together with industry, academia, and government, this unassuming facility has become the hub for the green roof industry in Western Canada with a focus on the widespread application of light weight, affordable, and low maintenance roofs in the region.

Green roof technology - the partial or entire covering of rooftops (and more recently, walls) with vegetation and soil – has become a cutting-edge application in sustainable building design that offers cost-effective solutions for many urban environmental concerns. First developed in Western Europe, the green roof industry emerged in Canada in the late 1990s, and has since seen the growing adoption of green roofs in cities across the continent.

By interfacing living plants with the building envelope, green roofs protect buildings from the damaging effects of UV radiation and temperature fluctuations, thereby extending the lifespan of its waterproofing while reducing the building's energy consumption. Green roofs also improve air quality, lessen storm water impacts by controlling runoff, and provide undisturbed habitat for wildlife.

To learn more about green roof technology, BCIT offers a number of courses and workshops, and CAGRT holds open houses at the Green Roof Research Facility at GNWC every third Thursday of the month, starting at 3:00PM. Visit www.greenroof.bcit.ca for more information.

For over three years, the UBC scene shop at Great Northern Way Campus has provided production space for students and Vancouver's performing-arts community. The 9,700-square-foot facility was established in 2004 through a one-time grant, and has since been leased from GNWC by UBC. The scene shop provides affordable rental space for scene construction (replete with the largest thermoplastics vacuform machine in the city), offers small rehearsal rooms for artists to pursue innovative work, and serves as the storage site for much of the UBC scenic stock.

In recent years, Vancouver's cultural production space has diminished to a critical level. The scene shop, and the nearby 12,000 sq. ft Black Box Studio – the largest of GNWC’s production and rehearsal facilities – have in turn served as unique and vital resources for over 60 Vancouver arts organizations, including companies such as Touchstone Theatre, Bard on the Beach, Rumble Productions, and Carousel Theatre.

In light of the need for production space, GNWC and UBC Theatre-design Professor Robert Gardiner, are looking to create a larger, multipurpose, and financially self-sustaining arts incubator. "[The Art Factory] would be long-term. It would have an identity, an official existence and funding to dependably keep going," says Gardiner. The broad artistic mandate, formal partnership structure of GNWC and funding model for this proposal would make the facility unique, he says, in Canada - and possibly North America.

In the meantime, GNWC is making every effort to use its existing facilities to build the campus’ reputation as the hotspot for innovative and experimental work that merges traditional art forms with emergent forms in digital media. "The great cultural cities of the world all have warehouse districts with flourishing art scenes," says Brad Foster, GNWC’s Director of Communications. "London’s Docklands, Beijing's Factory 798 District and New York's Soho are all perfect examples. We want to be this kind of district for Vancouver and British Columbia. We just need a little help."