Build Toronto got its rezoning approval this past week for what it expects will be Ontario's greenest office building.
The approval follows a similar approval from the North York Community Council, and makes the project a fair bet to make it through the rest of its hoops.
Despite its lofty carbon reducing ambitions, it hasn't been an easy road for the city's arm's length development corporation.
"I think there's a good tension between what we and the market view as the requirements, and what the planning people at the city and the residents view as the requirements," says
Build Toronto's senior vice president of development, Don Logie.
In addition to altering the passenger pick-up and drop-off area and pushing the entire $150-million building back from the street, Build Toronto, which originally envisioned a 9-storey building, has dropped it to 7-storeys, and the current plan for 367,000 rentable square feet is about 20 per cent less than the original plan called for.
Designed by
KPMB with their own
Manitoba Hydro building as a model, the building will have in-floor radiant cooling and heating, as well as an eight-storey "solar chimney" that KPMB says will give the building a natural system of ventilation.
Located at the corner of Yonge and York Mills, it will also have direct lobby access to the subway and a direct connection to GO buses.
If everything else goes smoothly, ground will break in 2012, and the building will be completed, according to Logie, by the end of 2014.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Don Logie
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