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.

Anthem Properties is proposing to rezone a 6.0 acre site at 319 North Road for their upcoming project, entitled “SOCO“. The site is currently home to the Best Western Plus Coquitlam Inn Convention Centre and liquor store. 

The application to the City of Coquitlam proposes to rezone the site from the existing C-2 General Commercial and RS-l One-Family Residential to C-7 Transit Village Commercial to accommodate a phased, mixed-use development.

The site is located within the Burquitlam-Lougheed Neighbourhood Plan (BLNP)
and the Burquitlam-Lougheed ‘Core’ area in the TDS. The current OCP land use
designation on 319 North Road is Transit Village Commercial, and the current
designation on 566 Lougheed Highway is High Density Apartment Residential.

The proposed development includes 1,386 market condo units in five towers,
along with retail, restaurant, and office space. The overall gross buildable area can be up to a maximum of 1,185,607 SF.

The first phase of the project is located along North Road, and includes two towers (27 and 31 storeys) with condo units above a podium with a large restaurant space, commercial retail units, indoor and outdoor amenity space, and office space. 

The other three towers, to be built in three further phases, include tower heights of 24, 34 & 44 storeys.

Details of the first phase include:

• 494 condo units;
• 50 studios, 192 one-bedrooms and 252 two-bedroom units;
• 7,501 SF of restaurant space;
• 7,990 SF of retail space;
• 50,316 SF of office space;
• a total site density up to 4.5 FAR;
• 843 parking spaces;
• a new East-West collector and North-South Road;
• $45.9 Million in density bonus funds and CACs.

The architect for the project is IBI Group.