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FEBRUA RY 2017 | 63 Yorkville Village PHOTOGRAPHY + RENDERINGS COURTESY FIRST CAPITAL REALTY Yorkville Village by YVAN MARSTON I t's not the first time the Hazelton Lanes mall in Toronto's Yorkville neighbourhood has seen a hammer swing in the name of renovation. It's not the second time either. In fact, there have been a number of works that have seen this once 60,000-square-foot, 1970s mall grow into a 210,000-square- foot luxury retail destination. But this time, after a $145-million investment, you'd be hard pressed to call a project of this magnitude a renovation. Still, that's where things began, explains Pochi Lu, an associate at Kasian. "But when we did visioning and design workshops with [new owners] First Capital, it became clear that an entire rethink of the project from an urban design perspective was required," he says. The rethink proposed improving the connections between the interior retail and the adjacent streets to attract pedestrians, as well as a complete revitalization of the dated food services and common areas with an eye to creating a more contemporary and welcoming space for users not only to shop, but to stay. The once gloomy and confusing layout has been entirely replaced by an easy-to-navigate floorplate at the heart of which is an airy central space – named the Oval Square for its prominent oval skylight. The new mall's cream and white palette is suffused with natural light that comes not just from the 2,400-square-foot skylight, but also from other areas like its prominent new two-storey-high, glass curtain wall entrance on Avenue Road. Even the entrance that gives out onto a 7,000-square-foot outdoor animation space, which opens a wide, two-storey presence to Yorkville Avenue, offers slivers of sunlight through its skylights and clerestory. Ready to distance itself entirely from the former mall's brick-and- window style, Yorkville Village, as it is now known, serves up a bright, tasteful canvas against which its retailers' frontages can provide a punch of colour. "In shopping centres, you want your retailers to be the feature," explains Stephanie Labrecque, project director with GH+A Design, the Montreal- based firm responsible for the interior fit and finish of the public spaces. GH+A specified a number of high- end finishes throughout the centre but that are especially prominent in the food service area. Diners sit at hard-surfaced and wood-topped tables finished with bevelled edges; feature walls are dressed in custom- designed mosaic tile patterns and overhead a ceiling feature made of hundreds of small oval mirrors brings to mind the calm of a pebbled beach. But those are the details; the big moves come from the recognition that downtown retail centres must connect with the pedestrians who walk by them. On the Avenue Road side, the former brick facade was removed, lower levels were backfilled and a prominent new entrance – a white, light-filled, two-storey box whose marquee is animated by thousands of colour-changing LEDs – was erected to meet pedestrians at street level. Inside, escalators, stairs and a small lift provide access to upper or lower levels. This was one of the project's significant structural interventions, explains Sean Smith, a principal at Entuitive. "It's a concrete building but we built the infill with structural steel, both to keep the load down on the existing columns and footings but also because it was easier to bring steel on site than to have to do formwork and pour concrete," says Smith. With a zero lot line, no air rights and a delicate relationship to manage with the condominium residents whose living space is part of the same structure, construction staging was just one of the project's many challenges. To make it work, Aaron Sartorelli, project manager at Traugott, used a combination of scheduling and diplomacy. "Usually you renovate a mall at night, but in this case we had very high noise restrictions due to the condos above," he says. Restricted at night and during the day (since the centre remained fully operational) the team worked hard to impress on the trades the importance of the noise restrictions, and they brought material in at every daylight opportunity. For some material deliveries they could get temporary lane closures on Avenue Road, but there was never anything permanent. Much of the material was brought in by sharing the loading dock with the mall's anchor tenant, Whole Foods Market. A-D Engineering Group Ltd. came up with different temporary support systems to reinforce the existing floor and roof structures so that they could carry the loads from heavy construction equipment that was being used during the construction. The Traugott team tackled a number of challenges, from renovating three entrances and demolishing an existing building to make way for the Yorkville entrance, to stripping the entire mall down to the bare concrete structure and building it back up with high- end finishes – and level 5 drywall finish work where the oval skylight draws attention to the craftsmanship of the interior wall surfaces. A-D Engineering Group Ltd. assisted in coming up with demolition procedures and associated temporary supports so that parts of the existing structure could be safely removed. Perhaps the biggest challenge of this project was a mechanical one: how to lift 220,000 pounds of new HVAC equipment to a fourth floor mechanical penthouse without using an overhead crane. "We cut paths through the concrete floors," says Traugott's VP of business development Thomas Moch, explaining 10:43 AM

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