Award

December 2015

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DECEMBER 2015 | 61 One Bloor East PHOTOGRAPHY BY DOUBLESPACE PHOTOGRAPHY/COURTESY HARIRI PONTARINI ARCHITECTS One Bloor East BY ROBIN BRUNET L os Angeles has Hollywood and Vine, New York has Broadway and 42nd St., and for many of its residents, Toronto has Bloor and Yonge streets as its iconic downtown intersection. Soon, that intersection will have an iconic mixed- use facility that combines the best ele- ments of densification with a great shop- ping experience. One Bloor East is a 76-storey, mixed- use residential facility that will maintain a pleasing breadth of streetscape, add new retail outlets to the downtown core and provide 789 units of living space. As of October, the building was being prepped for partial occupancy in the New Year, and ultimately the facility will be finished sometime in 2017. For Tucker HiRise Construction, the chal- lenges posed by the urban site led to unique construction solutions; for Hariri Pontarini Architects, the project was a chance to create something special within the confines of an envelope that had already been determined via zoning. When completed, One Bloor East will rise above six levels of subgrade parking with retail spaces on the first two lev- els. The podium will contain 100,000 square feet of retail, commercial, res- idential and amenities spaces, with the levels clearly defined by the step- ping back of the terraces on the Yonge Street side. The stepped-back podium preserves the existing street scale and allows the tower to be present at the intersection without being oppressive. Esthetically, One Bloor East is defined by undulating forms. The flow- ing lines of the curtainwall system begin at the podium terraces and continue up the tower to the sloped rooftop. The ends of the residential frit glass balco- nies step back and forth to present an undulating sculptured effect, made more dramatic by the aluminum hand- rails and the tempered glass of the bal- conies' balustrade. The rectangular form of the tower allows for effective suite layouts and serves as a backdrop for the facade's curves. Hariri Pontarini Architects started preliminary drawings for One Bloor East in the summer of 2009, and project manager David Wyatt calls the project, "One of our bigger jobs, and unusual in that the site already had a history with a different developer and had already been rezoned accordingly. When Great Gulf came in, in July of 2009, and we were retained as the architects, we had to develop our tower within the enve- lope already determined by zoning, which was quite a challenge but ulti- mately successful." Another design challenge was inter- connecting the tower with an existing public corridor that runs underneath the sit to the subway. "Apart from that, the project proceeded smoothly and Great Gulf was fabulous to work with," says Wyatt. The podium was the integral com- ponent in the overall goal to increase density while contributing to the pub- lic realm; widened sidewalks would give easy access to retail, and a mid-block public pathway was created to lead to the subway station and an underground shopping concourse. As for structural strength, accord- ing to Jablonsky, AST and Partners, the building contains a central reinforced concrete core within a reinforced con- crete core, with the outer core being car- ried on 10 columns that extend down through the six parking levels onto a reinforced concrete mat footing, below which caissons were added to deal with the soil pressures and settlements below the mat. The specially reinforced central concrete core configurations interact with the surrounding shear walls to resist lateral forces resulting from wind and seismic affects. Tucker HiRise started drilling cais- son walls and performing other excava- tion work in August 2011, by which time

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