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Construction mockups aren’t exactly a novel idea, but creating one long before a building is under construction is unusual. PCL Constructors Canada Inc. did just that at the Durham Consolidated Courthouse in Oshawa, where a $300,000 full-scale mockup of one of the new complex’s 33 courtrooms was completed off-site a year prior to construction. It proved to be a good idea.

The changes made to the design at mockup stage likely prevented six to eight weeks of disruptions (due to change orders) during construction – a period that could have set construction of the $334 million courthouse complex two-to-three weeks behind schedule, says Don Gilliland, PCL’s construction manager.

P. J. Daly Contracting Ltd., of Hamilton, did the drywall contract for the mockup, which included 20,000 square feet of drywall. To meet the room’s stringent STC-55 sound rating (office/meeting rooms typically only require STC-35), the contractor installed two sheets of drywall on either side of each wall with a six-inch stud cavity.

The room featured 18-foot-tall walls, acoustic ceiling panels, and a number of bulkheads. The mockup was completed in October 2007 and P.J. Daly returned the following February to perform alterations to suit client requirements, says the company’s president Dan Daly. One of the alterations was to the bulkheads, which were redesigned in smaller sizes to eliminate harsh shadows cast in the room. Also learned from the mockup was that the specified fabric-covered acoustic wall panels would be difficult to keep clean so painted drywall was selected for the final design. The mockup also featured extensive millwork by Art Magic Carpentry (AMC) Inc.

P.J. Daly has done other mockups, including a pit mockup in a warehouse for the Niagara Falls Casino and a mockup for a hospital in North Bay, Ont. Daly expects the contractor will do more. “Mockups have proven to aid in identifying and resolving issues prior to actually performing the work on-site.”

Furthermore, when a mockup is done well in advance of the actual project, the building team has the luxury of time – time to work out bugs and sort out material manufacturing schedules.
While mockups of the courthouse complex’s magnitude are uncommon, Galliland says they are appropriate for large design-build projects where there is a lot of repetition of spaces. Hospitals are an example and mockups might be apt for some high-end highrise condo projects like some of those in Toronto and Vancouver.

While it would seem that P. J. Daly and Art Magic held a competitive advantage when it came time to bid on the actual courthouse project, neither contractor was awarded a job. Downsview Drywall Contracting won the wall and ceiling contract and Provincial Store Fixtures Ltd. scored the millwork job for the 455,000 square foot courthouse.

The courthouse complex is the first in Ontario to be delivered as a full DBFM (design, build, finance, and maintain) project by Infrastructure Ontario (IO), an agency that uses public-private expertise to build projects in the province. The development/building consortium’s obligations include the financing, operation, and maintenance of the building over the next 30 years.

That is no small commitment and it is made larger by the fact the building consortium, which includes PCL, is on the hook to meet stringent energy performance standards. Energy usage will be 42 percent less than similar buildings designed to the Model National Energy Code of Canada for Buildings. That translates to 50 percent less energy consumption than the provincial court complex built in Brampton (another Toronto suburb) about a decade ago, says Peter Wilson, IO’s vice-president of project delivery. Construction of the courthouse was completed by PCL last November, three weeks ahead of schedule.