Ok, I did this from scratch just for you guys
For the theater, I simply massed in "sensibly-scaled, neutral, heritage-respecting mixed-use development to pay for renovations" lol. Any But SSP isn't the crowd for that... so now onto the "landmark"!
Oh, also I plaza'd the end of Smith street to rescue the pocket park from its glorified traffic-circle status. I wanted the site to be mainly a plaza connecting both sides of downtown, and with heritage buildings lining the adjacent blocks, a new tower, however big, needs to touch down very lightly on the site to not overpower the smaller scale of those buildings. What I like about top-heavy buildings is how they maximize public space without sacrificing square footage. And if Vancouver House was feasible (top floors are twice the size of lowest floor), then maybe the 2.5:1 ratio here might work too!
This design isn't my usual style, but is a slightly crazier version of an unbuilt work project in Calgary that was inspired by how the Bow dwarfed the city's skyline at the time, that, for me, answered the question of "what is a prairie skyscraper?" It's not driven by the kind of high-priced desirability crammed into geographically-constrained coastal cities with good transit that spurs organic forest-like vertical growth, but more by the clustering of public space into discrete megastructures that offer shelter from the extreme climate. Some of the largest rec-centre/library/arena/civic combo buildings in Canada are in the prairies. I thought of the opening scenes of the 2009 Stark Trek reboot and the silhouettes of the megaliths against the flat Iowa landscape. The number 1 feature of the prairie landscape is the sky, so it was from there that the built form draws its relationship, but instead of reaching up to it, what if the sky reached down to touch the earth... like da Vinci's
Creation of Adam... if that didn't kill your BS meter, just call it The Tornado.
Stats:
Height - 230m / 51 floors
Square footage - ~1.2 million sf
Floorplates - from 14,000sf to 34,000 sf
View down Arthur St
View down Notre Dame and Ellice
This is only to show that I briefly thought about structural grid and elevator cores
Biggest regret is that I initially worked myself into a corner with the detailing and forgot that the tower sections didn't have to shrink from all sides downward, but could grow a bit in places to create terraces and add movement to the tornado silhouette. If I had more time, the tower plates would be rationalized to a more rigorous structural grid, and the sculpting would be more deliberate to respond to localized surrounding conditions at each height (i am from Vancouver afterall). And while the louvers were the quickest way to express the "grain" of the facade, this would've been a great project for the type of screens from the unbuilt Le Phare project by Morphosis. Anyway, for 3 hours work, i'm ok with this!
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Still love to see some of your older designs. I need to start texturing and lighting some of what I have built to get back into what I've started.
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