A development application has been submitted to the City of Vancouver for permission to develop a 41,147 SF site at the Northwest corner of Clark Drive and East 6th Avenue, directly South of VCC-Clark Station and adjacent the ‘East Van’ Cross in East Vancouver. The I-3 zoned site also borders Keith Drive, hence the project address 2102 Keith Drive.

The plan for the site is an 8-storey mass-timber office building that includes:

• 124,000 SF of office space;
• 18,370 SF floorplates;
• A total density of 3.0 FSR;
• A total building height of 117 feet;
• 141 underground parking spaces.

The application describes the design rationale: “Located at the prominent eastern gateway to the False Creek Flats area, the massing of the 2102 Keith Drive building responds to the constraints of the site; rectangular in plan, the south face of the building is angled to match the Metro Vancouver Sewer SRW. The first floor of the building has been integrated into the sloping grade of the site, creating a building that emerges from the landscape. To the north, the ground floor relates to the industrial character of the False Creek Flats area through robust materials, service access and overhead doors. To the west and south interfaces of the building, a dynamic landscape design connects to the Great Northern Way Greenway and park spaces located to the south of the site. With the building lobby prominently located at the south-west corner of the site at Keith Drive and East 6th Ave, the building engages with the streetscape through a highly-glazed first floor facade that steps to match a series of landscaped terraces that animate the public realm at street level. Above the landscape-oriented ground floor, the building is constructed with mass-timber, a contemporary update of the typology of mass-timber buildings that were historically built for commerce and industry in East Vancouver.

The structural design of the building utilizes an innovative perimeter structural system of diagonally oriented braces which are integrated into the architecture of the building to create the primary expression of the building.”

Under the site’s I-3 zoning, the application is “conditional” so it may be permitted; however, it requires the decision of the Development Permit Board.

The architect for the project is Dialog.

The site was sold in 2016 for $17,530,000, or $142 per buildable SF.

VivaGrand Developments has applied to the City of Vancouver for permission to develop 1555 Robson Street, a site at the corner of Robson and Cardero Streets in Downtown Vancouver. The 132 x 131 ft site is located in the West End Community Plan which rezoned the property to C-6, which conditionally allows for a market residential highrise if social housing and commercial space is included.

The site sits directly south of 1550 Alberni, a 43-storey condo tower by Westbank currently under construction.

The proposal is for a 28-storey tower that includes:

• 177 residential units including 24 units of social housing;
• Retail on the ground floor;
• Office space on floors 2-3;
• Social housing on floors 2-7;
• Condos on floors 8-28;
• A total density of 9.63 FSR:
• A building height of approximately 300 ft.

Vivagrand acquired the site in October 2017 for $79,500,000 or $455 per buildable SF based on the gross floor area in the application.

The architect for the project is IBI Group.

The full development application can be viewed here: https://development.vancouver.ca/1555robson/index.htm

A development application has been submitted for the first phase of the Oakridge Centre redevelopment, for which the overall development plan was approved earlier this year. 

The first phase will consist of two towers (Towers 3 and 4), and a portion of the future park. Details include:

• one 32-storey tower (Building 3) and one 42-storey tower (Building 4)
• 504 market condo units;
• 212 one-bedrooms, 260 two-bedrooms & 32 three-bedroom units;
• a podium containing retail/office Uses (Levels P1 – 6);
• 173,113 SF of office space in Building 3;
• all over three levels of underground parking;
• a portion of the future 9-acre Park;
• a total density of 0.74 FSR;
• a maximum geodetic building height of 189.38 m for Building 3, and 217.28 m for Building 4.

The application describes the design rationale: 

“Skin & Bones Concept
The metaphor of skin and bone is the ordering principle for the Architectural Tectonic. It is born from the idea of draping the Mall with a landscaped Park. The act of wrapping or revealing becomes architecturally significant when defining the relationship between the landscape and buildings, as an approach to breakdown the mass of the buildings, as a passive solar strategy to have the buildings respond to their environment, and for providing wayfinding and programmatic identity.

Skin as Veil
Expanding upon the skin & bones concept, the skin is treated like a fine light fabric that wraps the buildings in a unifying veil. It is both delicate and protective, and is expressed architecturally as a plane of Curtain Wall that extends past the building itself in vertical and horizontal fly-bys. The Curtain wall design is reduced to its essence of transparent glass using 4 sided SSG, grey sealant and gaskets, light colored shadow boxes and only horizontal spandrel. The extent of the wrapping of the veil is related to the buildings orientation, as the veil opens toward the light, allowing the deep recessed terracing of the bones to shade the spaces within.”

The architect for the project is Henriquez Partners Architecture.

A rezoning application for a 2,752 SF site at the corner of Carrie Cates Court and Lonsdale, directly across the street from Lonsdale Quay. 1 Lonsdale Avenue is currently occupied by an italian restaurant, Gusto Di Quattro. The site has been owned by the Babalos family since 1941 and they are the developers. 

The application seeks to amend a previous CD zoning to support a new 3-storey passive house commercial building that would consist of a ground floor restaurant and two levels of office space above. Due to the site’s small size, off-street parking is not possible and the applicant is requesting a waiver.

Details of the proposal include:

• a total floor area of 6,963 SF;
• 2,159 SF of restaurant space;
• 4,804 SF of office space;
• a density of 2.53 FSR;
• a building height of 39 feet.

The architect for the project is John Hemsworth.

Reliance Properties has submitted a development permit application to the City of Vancouver for permission to develop “Tower C” at Burrard Place. The first two towers included a 55-storey residential tower with 444 units, sold out in 2016, and a 130,000 SF office tower on Burrard. The third tower is located mid-block on Hornby Street, at 1261 Hornby. 

The plan for the third tower includes a 35 storey mixed
use building, including the following:

• 206 condo units;
  • 105 one-bedrooms, 100 two-bedrooms and one three-bedroom;
• 27 market rental units;
  • 16 studios and 11 one bedrooms;
• 5,120 SF of retail;
• 40,252 SF of office;
• A building height of 368 ft;
• 9 levels of underground parking accessed from the lane with a total 375 parking spaces.

The application describes the design rationale: “Like most towers in Vancouver, Tower C’s massing is heavily shaped by zoning conditions, which in this case produces a simple volume with a nearly square plan of 36 stories. Our approach to the image of the building therefore has been influenced by this simple prismatic quality and by the fact that the neighboring towers are lighter in overall color and tone. To this end, we have developed a kind of supergrid of “modules”, here articulated by dark gray metals
against low iron glazing, that reads distinctly different than the lighter grids of Tower A and the punched white brick façade of Tower D.

Like cells in an analogue film strip, these modules track up the building in four bays, each slipping past one another, suggesting motion and revealing the “action” within each module. This composition plays in elevation with the symmetry of the typical floor plan through the interlocking material logic of clear / silver glazing systems and the gray metal panel system. To further refine this supergrid, black ceramic frit is used as a kind of graphic tailoring that includes radiused and thickened corners.”

The architects for the project are Neil Denari and IBI Group.