This 22-storey office tower is the first building in Canada to achieve the 2009 LEED Platinum standard that includes an innovative site-wide utility, rainwater harvesting, and solar panel system. The office tower features 14,000 ft2 of green roofs growing organic produce, Sky Garden meeting rooms, programmable LED lighting projecting colour images on the soffit, media wall at high-zone curtain wall, a long-spanned glass canopy supported by the two fulcrums glulam spine with 240 pieces of custom patterned and sized curved glass, and 55,000 ft2 of office floors with a hanging structural steel framing design. Typical office floors are architectural fairfaced finishes to concrete soffit and columns. Electrical and mechanical services are under- floor installation and covered with a composite access floor system. The radiant cooling and heating system is cast into post-tensioning concrete slabs. The project also featured a 48-floor residential component and 7-floor parkade.

Project type:
Office tower
Client:
Westbank Project Corp. and TELUS
Architect:
Henriquez Partners Architects
Contractor:
Icon Pacific Construction Corp.
Location:
Vancouver, BC
Services:
Construction management
Construction duration:
36 months
Completion date:
2015
Construction value:
$159 million
Project size:
507,615 ft2

Challenges / solutions

One of the many challenges was material logistic management to ensure project schedule and quality requirements were met. Due to the long- spanned glass canopy supported by the two fulcrums glulam spine in 90 meters with 240 pieces of custom patterned and sized curved glass and a hanging structural steel framing design, this required additional procurement planning and lead time to obtain the specialized glass from offshore suppliers. Quality assurance and control required exact measurements and fabrication details to fabricate the curved glass panels, along with proper lead time for the successful on-time delivery.

The hanging structural steel framing design also required additional coordination and logistics, as this was an innovative design which required local steel fabricators to use a different technical approach to their standard fabrications. Quality control and quality assurance were of the utmost concern along with the delivery to maintain overall scheduling requirements, including material delivery, and additional coordination from the designer and quality management team was engaged at the fabrication site.