Across Canada, the current shortfall of IT specialists is close to 50,000 positions. McGill University, as one of the leading educational institutions in Canada has responded to this with its two new major projects under development. One of the buildings is the new Genome Center for research in biotechnology and the other one is the Information Technology Building, or Lorne M. Trottier Building named after its financial donor. A McGill Electrical Engineering graduate himself, Trottier is a co-founder of Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd. made a generous gift towards the funding of the future home for the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering faculties.

My thesis project will address the need of McGill University for a new place to house the increasingly demanded field of Information Technology. Since it is a real life issue my approach to the thesis project will be a pragmatic one. That means that I will take the site that has been previously chosen for the building, evaluate its opportunities and constraints, study carefully the demands and the vision that the university has and deliver a realistic solution.

My in-depth study will be how technology changes the learning environment and how buildings respond to the constantly emerging new technology. I am aiming towards flexible and functional spaces, integrated learning/research/classroom environments, different levels of interactivity between the city and the campus, between students and professors and between people and technology, which helped me to derive the premise of THE HUB.

Furthermore, with the computers becoming a bigger part of our lives, and with the always-advancing virtual reality applications, soon there will be the need to counterbalance them as much as possible with nature. Therefore light, materials and program layout in the building will be generated in a way to alert the users that they are still part of a rich natural environment but at the same time allow them to immerse into the vast world of technology, like a gateway between the virtual and the real.