Construction of Calgary’s new Central Library, on the site of a current parking lot at the southeast corner of 7 Ave. and 3 St. S.E, is set to begin with an initial focus on melding the current Somerset-Bridlewood/Crowfoot CTrain track into the building’s design.

Nearly 135 metres of the LRT line is set to cut through a section of the 26,000 square metre building, which will be erected east of Calgary City Hall.

“To enable vertical development of the site for Calgary’s New Central Library, we need not only to encase the LRT tracks, but we need to do it safely and in a manner that doesn’t cause prolonged disruption of transit service for the tens of thousands of Calgarians who ride that LRT line every day,” said Michael Brown, Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC) President & CEO.

Building around the track is expected to be a 16-18 month endeavour which will be completed in phases:

Installing foundations, support beams and walls on either side of the LRT line

Relocating underground power cables

Lowering LRT overhead power supply wires

Installing roof panels above the LRT line (to be completed at night and during LRT downtime)

“The four-stage encapsulation process is really quite intricate,” said Kate Thompson, Director of Development, CMLC. “It’s taken our team a few months of investigation to fine-tune the sequence and coordinate it with LRT activity. There’s been a lot of collaboration with Calgary Transit and ENMAX, who’ve been very supportive of the project and the process.”

The estimated cost of the LRT line encapsulation is between $20 million to $25 million, approximately 10 per cent of the library’s construction total budget ($245 million).

The encapsulation is scheduled to be in place by the summer of 2015.

Proposed designs for the Central Library will be submitted to council in the fall of 2014 by architecture firms Snøhetta and DIALOG.

For more information on the LRT encapsulation process, EastVillage Calgary has posted the following promotional video: