Quote:
Originally Posted by DowntownBooster
Being that you don't live in Winnipeg, you don't know how long we've been waiting for something to eclipse the height of the Richardson Building completed in 1969 (even though the CanWest tower is technically taller, it's only by about 10 feet or so). Although the Manitoba Hydro building is basically single-tenant, it is still the largest development of office space in the city's history. With the square footage of this project they could easily have built it as a 40 storey tower. They also didn't have to build it as a single-tenant development but could have been part of a multi-use project (office, commercial & residential).
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As you say, the CanWest tower is the tallest in Winnipeg and dates from 1989-90. Here in Toronto we've had the same "tallest" since 1975. I suspect that virtually no one outside of skyscraper forums knows or cares, in either case.
You seem to be operating (like many skyscraper boosters on this forum) under the impression that the same square footage costs the same no matter what the height of the building is. Not so. First of all, the square footage that counts is rentable space. The lower floors of tall office buildings have very small leaseable areas, because their cores are taken up with all of the many elevator banks that have to service the various upper stages of the building. In my building in Toronto, we have four elevator banks of 8 elevators each (+ 2 service elevators). The bottom 20 floors have basically no interior space--it's all taken up by elevators going to the higher stages. That is very expensive space to build because it leaves you with little to rent out and also the problem of finding a tenant that can do business effectively in an oddly configured office. You need to have a very rich potential tenant to pay inflated rents at the top of the building in order to make up for what you lose at the bottom. Winnipeg doesn't have tenants like that.
That's part of the reason why you can't just translate square footage like that. In addition, you have to take into account all of the non-rentable space (or at least, not very productive space from the tenant's view) that has to be duplicated on each floor (maintenance, bathrooms, kitchens, etc.) or the fact that it is inherently expensive to build tall buildings. It's not some random choice whether you build a 10 storey 40,000 square foot per floor building or a 40 storey 10,000 square foot per floor one...with the decision dictated only by shadow-hating NIMBYs.
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Its happens in many other cities all the time... its just a fact of life in a growing city. You telling me that having a dense innercity in Vancouver hasn't restricted some views?
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