Labroco dropping fire
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Originally Posted by DirtWednesday
Woohoo 45th floor is back!
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It's the media... much like NHL trade rumours, it doesn't really matter until it's going ahead and confirmed.
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Originally Posted by DirtWednesday
From the article
Question: If they start digging in the middle of October which will take several months and start forming Piles late winter/early spring, you think this will help with hoarding costs? I think I'd try to get much of the podium done as possible before the start of winter 2018 so each new floor after that requires less hoarding.
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Concrete gets quite warm when it cures and the ground deep below isn't cold. Piles are not a "winter" concern for builders. This lets them tackle the grade beams, caps and slabs in spring
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Originally Posted by bomberjet
I don't get the need for so many parkades. 290 stall there. 700 stall within skycity. Maybe that's changed within slycity. But I'm not allowed to look at free press.
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Winnipeg obsesses over free parking like its a fucking civil right... all major downtowns have trouble for street level PAID parking... but they also have is thousands of highrises, many of which have their own underground parkades.
Parkades are super expensive, even moreso if they go underground, so you make your money back by building taller and taller... we don't have enough highrises with parkades and our office market cannot fill more tall highrises so these parkades have to go
somewhere... and we have a lot of surface lots. It's atleast a much more efficient use of a surface lot.
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Originally Posted by Biff
Someone else might want to chime in, but I think on large excavation projects it is easier to heat and hoard excavation in winter than to deal with constant de-watering and unstable soils in summer months. A lot of large projects start in late fall.
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I think it is, as I mentioned above, more to do with piling in winter, so they can start the bigtime concrete work first thing in spring... if you're excavating in summer then you're piling in fall and doing concrete in winter and paying more money... you also wouldn't delay the conrete until spring because it's hard to keep a job site moving if you break its momentum frequently, not to mention you lose money for keeping it open,
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Originally Posted by WolselyMan
I decided to take a walk downtown a week ago, and one thing that really struck me all of a sudden was just how much the whole area tries to cater solely for the needs of the automobile. Which is strange because downtowns are usually the parts of a city that are the most inconvenient for cars, and the most pedestrian friendly. And I'm not really talking about about all the parking lots we have flooding the area. Just the sheer amount of parkades we have lining the streets, or even the amount of buildings that have a parkade component built into them, sticks out quite a lot if you're a pedestrian in the area. The entrances to the parkades are always located right on the street, severely interfering with the continuity of the sidewalk. In fact these entrances are so common that only the avenues such as Graham, St. Mary and York are designed specifically with pedestrians in mind, with businesses and retail lining the sidewalk. The streets on the other hand are usually devoid of actual retail, and are instead filled with parkade entrances and car ramps. It's almost as if they take on the role of alleyways for the buildings on the avenues; relegated to doing all the backstage work of hosting loading zones and car garages.
Basically, it feels like we're trying to take a sprawling big box store retail district and try to compress it into an area that was never originally even meant to cater to automobiles in the first place. The result is an area that's both too cramped and elaborate to use a car conveniently, and too discontinuous and visually unappealing to create any valid pedestrian experience.
I completely understand the strong appeal of parkades. They drastically eliminate the need for ugly parking lots by creating a far more efficient use of land. The only real problem is that when you do need to build a parkade somehere, they're far more of a blight on the entire area than a parking lot would - particularly when you try to squeeze one into a tight crowded space.
In addition to them usually not fitting in with the other surrounding buildings, they smell of concentrated car fumes that leak into the surrounding air of the street. Absolutely awful for businesses surrounding the area. I don't know about the rest of you but I'd much rather prefer sitting out on a patio that's right next to a parking lot, rather than a giant smelly and unsightly parkade. Rory street Parkade anyone? https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.8969751,-97.1369404,3a,75y,251.4h,91.96t/data=!3m1!1e3
This is why I have so much respect for True North Square taking the extra care to put all of their parking underground. TNSE seems to understand the general rule that cars tend to ruin everything (except for the people driving inside them).
SkyCity already has a parkade built right into it. This should be enough. Replacing the St. Regis hotel with a parkade is the most insensitive thing you could possibly do for the block. |
As I mentioned above, going underground is super expensive. To offset that cost, you need more revenue. To get more revenue you need more leasable square feet which means you have to build taller and get more tenants. To build tall there needs to be demand, which Winnipeg doesn't have.
Yes, Winnipeg needs to become more pedestrian friendly and yes, Cities like Toronto, Vancouver, etc ARE more pedestrian friendly, but they also have (or have had, during past growth periods) far more demanding office markets that allow them to build very HIGH... and many of these highrises have underground parkades as their costs are offset by a higher density of rent-paying tenants. In Winnipeg we still need that parking as the residential market downtown hasn't matured yet and we have to park somewhere, so parkades (which are a major improvement over a surface lot) happen sometimes.
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