[SFUVancouver]

I'm in the audience at the UDP and this project has returned. It is a wholesale redesign. A back to the drawing board effort that massively improves on the first design. The proposed design has a much more organic form and there doesn't appear to be a straight line on it. A very high-end triple glazed curtain wall system will be used and it has offset two storey shallow vertical fins and there is opaque fritted glass on the slab edges that fades to clear vision glass for the floors above and below. The floorplate has changes from a symmetrical six-sided hexagon to an asymmetric triangle that curves on all sides and energetically rounds the corners and billows out somewhat to the north in a top to bottom convex curve and pulls in to the east to create a concave curve with an elegant cantilever near the top facing the Marine Bldg. The roof appears enclosed in glazing like the new 8th Avenue Place bldg in Calgary but it is a smooth curve that slopes in three dimensions up from the north and then tips over to the south with a five storey range in height. The building's signature "folding peak" (my words) faces east to the Marine Bldg and twists away to one side so that the view axis along Hastings to the Marine Bldg will not have the spire of that building clash with the major curving feature of the proposed office bldg. The height is just shy of 475' and it would look absolutely spectacular in the range of the new proposed max height in the CBD of around 700'. I enthusiastically declare this the best new office building proposal in the city.

Hed Kandi may actually approve of this one since it would be entirely at home in New York or the La Defense district of Paris. In fact this one reminds me a lot of one of the recent towers that went up in Paris in recent years.

The panel voted enthusiastically to support it and were nearly unanimous that it should be tall enough to stand above the Shaw Tower and Fairmont Pacific Rim.

It passed.