Catherine Hefler of Architecture49 and Sean Andrew of PCL walk through the Bedford Ravines school — at roughly 256,000 sq ft the biggest public school in Nova Scotia — and explain why the project’s real story is the delivery model that made it possible.
At roughly 256,000 square feet, the West Bedford School is the largest school Nova Scotia has built. That’s a headline. The more useful one, for anyone who procures, designs, or builds public institutions, is the one underneath it: this was the first school in the province delivered under a collaborative design-build model, and it required Nova Scotia to select a proven architect-constructor team on value for merit, not on who came in cheapest.
Catherine Hefler is the national sector leader for education at Architecture49, an ALEP-accredited educational facility planner who came to architecture through a psychology degree, trained at Dalhousie, and spent time at GBSA in Toronto and Dialog in Vancouver before settling in at a firm that has since done the Charles P. Allen High School, LeMarchant-St. Thomas Elementary, and several more across Atlantic Canada. Sean Andrew is the PCL project manager who helped run the job — a field-first career that began on the Ottawa Senators arena and the Air Canada Centre and carries the kind of piece-by-piece planning discipline that gets learned from exacting superintendents, not classrooms. This episode of the Atlantic Construction Podcast puts both of them in the same room and gets specific.
What collaborative design-build actually is — and why it’s different
Collaborative design-build in Nova Scotia drew on the Department of National Defence’s modified design-build framework, a model Andrew had worked under several times on Gagetown projects before this. The core difference from traditional procurement is who the owner is actually buying. Under conventional public tendering, an owner hires an architect, gets drawings, then picks a general contractor from submitted prices. The two sides often meet each other at the tender table. Under collaborative design-build, the owner picks an architect-constructor pair as a single team upfront, evaluated on their ability to work together and on value-for-money — not on low bid. As Andrew puts it: “they’re not getting a designer they’re not getting a Constructor they’re getting a team.”
That matters practically because the GC is at the table from the first day of design. Hefler and Andrew describe a shared room — sometimes literally — where the Nova Scotia Department of Public Works sits alongside the design-build team, and cost dialogue is continuous instead of deferred to tender. When the masonry budget started pulling against the schedule, Andrew flagged it in real time: “there’s a shortage of Masons what if these walls could be built out of this instead that would help alleviate this trade.” The design changed. That is not value engineering after the fact; it is value engineering before the cost is baked in.
The practical argument for getting the GC in early is blunt: the earlier you catch a problem, the less it costs to fix. Andrew frames it simply: “it’s to your advantage to be involved especially on the on the GC side right from this Inception Point.”
Sequential tendering: how you start early and still get cost certainty
One of the mechanics the episode digs into is sequential tendering — the practice of tendering trade packages incrementally as design matures, rather than waiting for full drawings on the whole building. Civil work can go to tender at roughly 50% design completion; structure follows once the site package is committed; envelope and interiors come later.
The benefit is twofold: “it allows you to start early and it also allows the client to get a certain level of cost certainty.” You are not holding the whole project in abeyance while the last interior partition gets resolved. The client has priced and committed the civil scope, knows what the structure costs, and is making informed decisions about finishes against a number that is real.
When the overall budget got tight mid-design on this job, the team did not stop the clock. They peeled off a separate civil package just to keep the site moving: “we broke out a civil package just to rough grade the site.” Ground got turned while the building was still being resolved. That is a project management decision only available to a team that has control of both design and construction sequencing simultaneously.
One building, not two — and the community logic behind it
The project started as two separate schools on a sloped greenfield site in Bedford — a P–6 elementary and a 7–12 high school to serve a fast-growing suburb of Halifax. The pandemic meant the design-kickoff was virtual: digital program blocks arranged on a site plan, no physical charrette. What emerged from that process was the argument that merging two programs under one roof generated enough cladding, sitework, and mechanical efficiency to justify the operational complexity. A shared gym, a shared cafeteria, a community hub between two distinct entrances. The project “led to the idea that we could create a lot of efficiencies by” combining the programs — the efficiency argument carried the decision.
At around 256,000 square feet, the building is big enough that scale and wayfinding become genuine design problems. Hefler’s answer is the “house” concept: rather than a single large institution, the building is organized into wings, each of which “we called it a house and it has six classrooms.” Those six classrooms plus ancillary group rooms can be configured into twelve to fourteen distinct learning spaces. The student’s world is a manageable wing, not the whole building.
Value engineering that improved the design
Most conversations about value engineering treat it as subtraction — you cut the stone for precast, you swap the curtainwall for punched windows, you lose something you wanted. The episode has a counter-example worth studying.
The original partition strategy for the houses used operable walls — expensive moveable panels that create flexible space but tend to carry high price tags and maintenance overhead. PCL proposed demountable partitions instead. The demountable solution was “more cost effective and also lended this ability to really create a visual connection through these spaces.” Cheaper and better. The key factor was that the GC, already embedded in the design process, could make that suggestion early enough that the architect could evaluate it on its merits rather than treating it as an attack on the design.
Hefler’s operating principle in a cost-constrained environment is to identify the design moves that genuinely affect the people in the building, defend those with the owner, and cut elsewhere. The logic: “if we really you know try to protect this idea because this will really impact the kids in a certain way.” The rest is negotiable. A steering team — parents, teachers, students, DPW reps — was formally constituted even on this greenfield site with no existing school community: “at a certain point we got to develop a student or a school steering team.” That team had its say; one unused room became a second music space.
The educational thesis behind the floor plan
Hefler holds an Accredited Learning Environment Planner (ALEP) credential — one of roughly fifteen in Canada at the time this episode was recorded. Her design argument is empirical: the traditional school model, rows of desks facing a board, was built for a minority of learners. “I’ve heard statistics where it’s you know 15 of us would best learn by sitting and having someone do a presentation.” The other 85 percent need something different — group work, independent quiet, project space, soft seating, presentation areas.
The proof of concept she points to is the Charles P. Allen High School, an earlier Architecture49 education project in Bedford. She describes students voluntarily staying in the building on free periods rather than leaving — the environment was attractive enough to make that choice. A school that students choose to be in when they don’t have to be is a school that works.
Teacher collaboration is designed in, not assumed. Professional learning community spaces — small, visible, dotted through the school — allow teachers to work together in plain sight of students. The argument is twofold: genuine supervision, and a visible model of adult collaborative work that mirrors what students are being asked to do.
The labour read at the end of the tape
Andrew closes the episode with a clear-eyed assessment that will land differently depending on when you read this. The picture he describes is one where capacity across the whole supply chain — architects, consultants, suppliers, trades — is stretched thin at once: “you have one fire in Texas and suddenly you can’t get a whole bunch of materials for six months.” Single-point-of-failure procurement risk is no longer theoretical; it has been experienced. His advice is to plan defensively.
On labour, he is direct about a cultural problem: “we’ve gotten away from supporting the notion that being a tradesperson is great.” Reversing that requires more than wages. It requires the industry to make the case, actively, that a trades career is worth choosing — in schools, with parents, in the culture. Without it, he expects the industry to slow down and readjust. That’s a structural forecast from someone running big jobs, not editorial opinion.
The firms behind the building
PCL Construction is a 100% employee-owned contracting organization — Canada’s largest by revenue — operating across buildings, civil infrastructure, and heavy industrial work from an Atlantic Canada district headquartered in the Halifax area. Employee ownership shapes how knowledge moves through the organization: a national intranet, Quest bulletins, and an annual Excellence in Construction seminar mean that when a PM in Halifax has a problem, “is surely somewhere in the company someone’s done it before.” That institutional memory is a real asset on a first-of-kind procurement model.
Architecture49 is a national Canadian practice with an Atlantic Canada studio in Halifax serving all four provinces. Their education portfolio includes West Bedford School, Charles P. Allen High School, and LeMarchant-St. Thomas Elementary, and their work spans healthcare, science and technology, security and defence, sports, and transportation. The Halifax office traces its roots to WHW Architects, founded in 1945.
Guests: Catherine Hefler (Architecture49) and Sean Andrew (PCL Construction). Episode 67 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Project: West Bedford School. Receipts: building size and first-collaborative-design-build status confirmed via Architecture49 portfolio and the West Bedford School site.