BentallGreenOak tower set to rise in Vancouver’s business district
Grant Cameron August 16, 2019
BENTALLGREENOAK - An aerial rendering of the 32-storey office tower being built in downtown Vancouver.
A large excavator claws at a pile of grey rubble on a muddy parcel of land at 1090 West Pender Street in downtown Vancouver. A seven-level parkade at the site has been reduced to ground level and work has begun on the tear-down of an 11-storey tower that has been at the location for nearly five decades.
By the end of the year, demolition work at the site will be completed and operators will begin excavating six levels below street level for a parking garage and base of a new 32-storey, 534,000-square-foot office tower.
“It’s good soil,” says Tony Astles, managing partner and head of Canadian real estate services at BentallGreenOak. “We’ll just excavate and shore the sides to make sure it’s all tidy. It’s pretty straight-forward work for us.”
The new $300-million commercial development, dubbed B6, will be the third largest office tower in Vancouver. Co-owners of the building are OPTrust and BentallGreenOak Prime Canadian Property Fund. The building has been designed by Vancouver-based Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership and the general is Calgary-based Graham Construction.
Demolition work at the site began earlier this year. The new tower is expected to take just over three years to build and should be completed in early 2023.
For the underground walls, Astles said the developer will likely use shotcrete rather than formwork.
“We’ll wait until we get into the hole to see what soil conditions we have but probably we’ll use shotcrete.”
The building itself will have a unique shape, with the office tower larger at the top than the bottom, a design that passively reduces the solar load on the building.
The tower starts above a two-storey podium and expands from about 15,000-square-feet at the lower levels to 21,000-square-feet at roof level.
“Because it slopes from the top inward down it reduces the angle of incidence of the sun,” said Astles. “It reduces the solar effects on the inside of the building which reduces the mechanical equipment required to cool which also reduces the energy and reduces the cost.”
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BentallGreenOak has already secured a large tenant for the building. New York-based WeWork Cos. Inc. , which offers shared office space and services for a fee, has inked a deal to be the anchor tenant in the building and will occupy 10 floors spanning 170,000-square-feet in the lower part off the building.
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