The Best Seats
In The House

A facility founded firmly on the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) value of interrelatedness, Step by Step Child and Family Centre on the southern banks of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec provides care for children between the ages of 12 months and 6 years.

Utilizing a holistic approach to both child care and development, the facility has been aiding the community since its inception. With emphasis placed on each and every child who enters their programming, Step By Step always aims to be completely inclusive, believing that every child has the right to be a part of the mainstream and a contributing member of society.

One of our recent projects landed us in coastal New England, home of chowder, warm hospitality and some of the world’s most formidable sports franchises. While the region spans a total of six diverse U.S. states, this project took place in the picturesque state of Maine.

Located in Westbrook, a suburb of Portland, is the Spring Harbor Hospital, a 100-bed non-profit psychiatric hospital offering services for both children and adults.

Part of Maine Behavioral Healthcare, the facility has three adult units totalling 60 beds, a child unit with 14 beds, an adolescent unit with 14 beds and a 12-bed unit for patients with developmental disorders.

After some unfortunate water damage to certain areas of the hospital, the facility was undergoing some fairly heavy-duty renovations. During the process, stakeholders from within the organization got in contact with members of our team in search of fire-rated wall padding for one of the rooms in the hospital.

With campuses in both Vancouver and Kelowna, the University of British Columbia (UBC) is the province’s oldest and most established post-secondary institution. With a strong background in scientific advancements, the Vancouver campus is located a mere 10km from downtown and is home to roughly 65,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students across its two campuses.

In addition to housing the world’s largest cyclotron in the school’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, it is also home to the Thunderbirds, representing UBC’s student athletes, with teams in football, basketball, soccer, rugby, swimming and baseball. As part of a complete redesign to the Thunderbirds’ baseball park, our team was enlisted through our partners at RecTec Industries to lend a hand with the seating and customized padding for the stadium.

Long known as the heart of any school, the gymnasium means much more than a place in which to play sports for many students and members of the community. These facilities are now hubs for meetings, assemblies, athletic competition and community events. As such, more schools and other facilities are quickly recognizing the branding power these areas possess.

In addition to customized flooring, score boards and bleachers, facility operators often look to the permanent wall padding installed on the walls of the gymnasium as a safety precaution as another place where their message, logo or team colours can be presented.

One of our more recent projects brought us back to the historic city of Montreal. Nestled along the St. Lawrence River, the vibrant city is a pleasure to not only visit but to do business in as well.

The call came in a few months ago from a general contractor who was looking for assistance in designing some highly-customized wall padding for the high school located just outside of the city’s downtown core.

Before organizing our first on-site visit to the school, we were provided with some technical drawings to help our team better understand the challenges ahead. Given the complexity of the design of the space we were immediately connected with the school-commissioned architecture firm with whom we visited the location with.

Nestled along picturesque Lake Champion in northern Quebec lies the small Cree community of Nemaska. Located nearly 1,100KM north of Montreal, the community is a wonderful place to relax and enjoy the area’s outdoors and diverse wildlife.

Nemaska, which means “Place to Fish” is well known as a premiere fresh water fishing locale and promotes sustainable methods of tourism in the area with help of the local residents.

Born and raised with a strong connection to the outdoors, residents are well versed in hunting, fishing, trapping and other outdoor pursuits and continue to cherish and pass down this heritage to the next generation. Serving as home to such a diverse selection of outdoor activities, the community is known for camping and canoe tours during the summer, ice fishing, dogsledding and snowmobiling in the winter and various other events and activities throughout the year.

Balance, strength, coordination, flexibility and control are just a few of the words used to describe the sport of gymnastics. Practiced by both men and women around the world, the full-body movements prescribed by the sport require years of dedication and training.

As with most everything in sport, we are constantly learning more about our bodies and how we can better develop them for certain exercises. Strength and endurance training has long been a part of modern athletics but today’s athletes are tuning their bodies more than ever before to gain any competitive advantage available.

Directly translated as “the path of harmony through martial practice,” the martial art of aikibudo is unique in that both the attacker and the defender are referred to as partners rather than adversaries. The Japanese martial art is unique in that the traditional philosopher recognizes neither a winner nor a loser.

Tracing its roots back to the 1930s, this martial art has gained international acclaim in recent years, particularly in France, as well as in Europe and North America.

As part of one of our more recent projects, we were introduced to the art of aikibudo by the highly-trained team at Judo Aikibudo in eastern Quebec. As a borough of beautiful and historic Quebec City, the team at Judo Aikibudo specializes not only in aikibudo but also in other martial arts such as judo, tai-chi and self-defense training for women.

When it comes to developing the next generation of technical engineers in Canada, Montreal’s École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS) is a market leader. Ranked as the number one engineering school in the province of Quebec and fourth across Canada for the total number of engineering diplomas awarded on an annual basis ÉTS is a leader in developing engineering talent.

Tracing its roots back into the mid-1970s, ÉTS is a practical institution accredited by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board and is located in Montreal’s Griffintown neighbourhood.

Residing on the forefront of technology and innovation, the school reached out to our team in Montreal to discuss some unique needs for a program that involved rigorous testing of drones. With technology continuing to change the landscape and industry of these small, piloted aircraft, students at ÉTS were in need of an area indoors in which they could perform test flights and operations.

Dedicated to providing every child with the very best in educational opportunities, Ivy Hill Elementary School in Newark, New Jersey is making good on their goal to develop their student body into successful members of the community.

Located in the upper West Ward of Newark, Ivy Hill serves over 570 students across grades PreK3 to grade eight. Occupying the former location of Vailsburg Middle School, Ivy Hill is celebrating 10 years of operation after opening their doors in the fall of 2007. As a result of school reorganization efforts in Newark, which saw a shift away from the middle school model, the school today is fully integrated and aims to prepare students for high school and beyond within the boundaries of their historic location.