Award

64 | J UNE 2015 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games Athletes' Village / Canary District Under Waterfront Toronto, the gov- ernment agency formed in 2001 to plan, administer and oversee the redevelop- ment along the water's edge downtown, a tremendous amount of soil testing had been done on this former industrial site. What's more, a tremendous amount of planning had also been completed and building was already underway in the area. W hen the Pan American Sports Organization toured Toronto in the sum- mer of 2009, the flood protection plan, in the form of Corktown Common Park, was being realized; a public housing project was underway; Saucier + Perrotte's River City condos were going up; River Street, the Bayview extension and Mill Street were being built; and Cherry Street was designed and ready to go. "By the time Infrastructure Ontario was engaged to find a developer, we had approved drawings for roads and ser- vices, so they didn't have to design those and get them approved," says Meg Davis, Waterfront Toronto's VP of development for West Don Lands. "With the services already started and planning approvals in place, I think that had a lot to do with how Toronto won the Games." By the time the EllisDon team broke ground in the fall of 2011, Corktown Common was done, and the streets surrounding the project were mostly complete. Close to major highways and removed from the density of downtown, getting to the site was easy. Getting around it, however required roads. Teams began on the west side, con- necting utilities and building perma- nent roads to create access to the first and most complicated building, the stu- dent residence and YMCA structure. An unusually warm winter allowed crews to work through to spring completing close to 20 per cent of the underground services and roadways needed, and eas- ily enough to start building. "As a design build, we had to con- trol the pace of design with the pace of construction," explains Dittmar. "We couldn't get too far ahead in construc- tion. But once we started on a block, we needed to maintain a good flow of work." Blocks were completed sequentially rather than simultaneously – in part because access to blocks on the site depended on the construction of road- ways, but also because EllisDon did not want to overwhelm any particular trade. "You had to make sure everyone could keep up with the pace of the proj- ect," says Dittmar. Four different con- crete formwork companies were used for the structural work on the buildings. Even at this measured pace, the work would scale up. Some periods saw as many as 750 workers on site. To minimize the number of co-ordi- nation meetings and to manage the pace of design, three design/construction teams were struck, one for each building group – from institutional and commer- cial work of the YMCA/ George Brown Student Residence, to the public housing component and the condominium part carried out under residential work. The speed at which the work was completed speaks to the imperative a games event can impose when a commit- ted team takes on the challenge. But its speed is also propelling a neighbourhood into reality years ahead of schedule. If the Games hadn't come along, says Meg Davis of Waterfront Toronto, her agency would have built out the area by steadily bring- ing blocks to market one by one. "The Pan Am Games probably accelerated the development of the neighbourhood by five to ten years," she says. KPMB's Bruce Kuwabara sees the work as a broad stroke of city building. "If the games are a catalyst for the Canary District," he says, "then the Canary Dis- trict is a catalyst for a fuller build out and connectivity to the Don River, the mouth of the Lower Don as well as the lands fur- ther south past the rail viaduct and the Gardiner Expressway." A LOCATION West Don Lands, Toronto, Ontario CLIENT Infrastructure Ontario / Waterfront Toronto DEVELOPER Dundee Kilmer INTEGRATED DESIGN TEAM KPMB Architects / architectsAlliance / Daoust Lestage Inc. / MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects PRODUCTION ARCHITECTS Page + Steele / IBI Group Architects HERITAGE ARCHITECTS FGMDA Architects DESIGN BUILD CONTRACTOR EllisDon Ledcor PAAV Inc. STRUCTURAL CONSULTANTS Halsall Associates Ltd. / Adjeleian Allen Rubeli Ltd. MECHANICAL/ ELECTRICAL CONSULTANT Hidi Rae Consulting Engineers BUILDING CODE CONSULTANT LRI Engineering Inc. BUILDING ENVELOPE CONSULTANT BVDA Facade Engineering Ltd. LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT NAK Design Group INTERIOR DESIGN Munge Leung BUILDING AREA 32 acres CONTRACT COST $514 million MegalithManagement.indd

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