Westbank‘s rezoning application for the Budget Car Rental site at 400 West Georgia Street has been submitted to the City. The site is located at the corner of West Georgia and Homer Street, across from the Central Library Branch. The letter of intent submitted by Westbank, suggests that the building will be built “on spec”.

The plan for the 20,992 SF (175′ x 120′) site calls for rezoning from Downtown (DD) District to Comprehensive Development (CD-1) District to allow for a 24-storey office building. The proposal includes:

• 350,000 SF of office space;
• 5,775 SF of retail space;
• a building height of 301 ft.;
• a total density 17.51 FSR;
• steel construction;
• six levels of underground parking; and
• 125 bicycle parking spaces.

Design features will include triple-paned curtain wall, openable windows, large spans of column free space, glass floors. It will also incorporate a 4-storey high lobby.

The application describes the design rationale:

The architect for the project is Merrick Architecture.

Oxford Properties has applied to the City of Vancouver for permission to build a brand new infill office building on an underutilized portion of a 59,000 SF lot and existing 22-storey office building property they own at 401 West Georgia (built in 1987) , which runs along Homer Street all the way to Dunsmuir Street on the North, where the new building will be located.

The plan is to build a new 9-storey office building on the North part of the property facing Dunsmuir Street. Details include:

• retail and office use on the ground floor and office use on the 2nd-9th floors;
• 4,654 SF of new retail space
• 147,000 SF of new office space
• Office floorplates of 14,000 – 19,000 SF
• 6,600 SF of amenity space, 2,300 SF conference centre & 4,300 SF fitness facility
• a building height of 139.4 feet
• two levels of underground parking accessed from the lane; and
• retention of the existing commercial building on the south portion of the site.

The project is being proposed under the existing DD zoning and so only requires a development permit as opposed to rezoning.

The architect for the project is B + H Architects Inc.

A new design has been presented for a previously approved office tower on the site of the current multi-level parkade at Granville and Cordova.

The site was previously approved in 2014 for a 32-storey, 380,000 SF office tower, but was subsequently sold by Greg Kerfoot to Bosa Development in July 2016.

The new design, by Kohn Pedersen Fox and Chris Dikeakos is a more interesting curved building form. The project now requires permission of the development permit board in order to proceed.

Since the project was originally proposed, this block has seen lots of activity, with Morguard proposing a 25-storey office tower at the corner of Hastings and Seymour, and more recently, a 28-storey tower proposed for the mid-block site on Hastings just East of Granville.

If all three projects proceed, this represents a total of 760,000 SF of new office space in this block.