With help from designers, commercial-building owners in Metro Vancouver have been creating foyers that blend function with high-impact style.
Owned by Deka Immobilien GmbH, Bentall 5 is the last tower built in Vancouver’s Bentall Centre complex. In designing the lobby, Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership kept in mind both the people within and the surrounding downtown.
“Bentall 5 is unique, [distinct] from any other office building in the downtown Vancouver core,” said Tony Astles, vice-president of B.C. real estate services at Bentall Kennedy (Canada) LP, the developer and property manager. “It’s turned 45 degrees relative to the city street grid, creating a more dominant entrance to the building and providing a direct line of vision from the lobby to the intersection of Burrard and Dunsmuir streets, which is considered to be the epicentre of the city’s financial district.”
Bentall 5’s unusual rotation and untinted, floor-to-ceiling vision glass admit abundant natural light into the lobby. This creates a seamless transition between the two-storey space and the adjacent public plaza with its greenery, water feature and, in its granite floor, a zigzag pattern that pays tribute to the river that ran through the site in the early 1900s.
“The idea was to showcase the animated landscape, which is alive with sound, movement and people, through the lobbyís floor-to-ceiling glass,” said Astles. “Moving inside, we wanted to see the same kind of interaction happening – so we added the [Blenz] café. When tenants want to break or collaborate in a more casual setting, they don’t have to leave the building.”
In addition to the coffee shop, the lobby features a second informal seating area arranged beneath a hanging panel sculpture. An enormous painting by Montreal artist Yehouda Chaki hangs between the elevator lobbies. “We took somewhat of an art-gallery approach to this design,” Astles said, explaining that the many granite, aluminum, stainless-steel and etched-glass components in the space create a soft-grey background that “was just screaming for a big punch of colour and life, which is what the painting provides. We see people who are walking outside stop to look [through the glass] at the art.”
Every element in the lobby was chosen with care: “The quality of the tenants and the building [is] reflected in the entry space – by the quality of the design and the materials used to execute it.”
A look at the evolution of the lobbies of Metrotowers I, II and III at Metropolis in Burnaby demonstrates how design value and tenants’ aspirations have changed over the past two decades.
Stantec Architecture designed all three office towers for developer Ivanhoe Cambridge. Peter Wreglesworth, senior principal at Stantec, describes the two-storey lobby of Metrotower I, constructed in 1985, as “relatively small,” offering direct access to a tenant directory and five high-speed elevators. Polished granite on the floor and walls, natural light streaming through 32-foot-high windows and giant tropical plants contribute to “a healthy and positive office environment.”
The second tower was built in 1988 with “similar thinking and values” and the idea of reinforcing “the overall office address of Metrotown,” according to Wreglesworth. The larger atrium of Metrotower II incorporates granite, steel and glass similar to those of Metrotower I: a “palette and choices” that “represented normal expectations of finishes for a Class A office building at that time.”
Metrotower III, designed in 2010 and slated for occupancy in 2013, is “a product of a different time,” said the architect. It addresses a greater public awareness of sustainability in energy, materials, recycling and water reuse.
“It’s also designed with a different attitude” about “how tenants will use the lobby,” Wreglesworth said. Not just an entry to the building, it offers space for informal meetings in an area that overlooks lush landscaping, waterfalls and generous walkways.
“It’s intentionally designed to be much more West Coast than corporate, appealing to a younger tenant while retaining an overall strength of identity that strengthens the Metropolis office-location brand,” Wreglesworth explained.
Sun Capital Corp. owner Philip Kim faced a genuine challenge in Vancouver’s Crosstown district when he purchased in 2008 (along with Argo Ventures Inc.) the 17-storey Sun Tower, widely recognized for its sea-foam-green dome and the nine bare-breasted maidens that support its cornice.
“This tower represents part of the city’s history,” said Kim. “It was important to make the old space more modern while keeping the heritage elements and restoring some of the damage.” After eight months of intensive research by cultural and heritage resource management firm Donald Luxton & Associates Inc., which involved going into the archives and looking at historical photos, Kim entered into partnership with Ted Murray Architect Inc. and Trepp Design Inc. to bring the lobby back to its original glory. This component represented a “major part of the restoration.”
“There were beautiful archways that had been sealed up in the 1930s, which we reinstated in limestone,” he explained. “We also rebuilt the old marble staircase that had been destroyed and re-fabricated the iron railing with original pieces that we found in the basement.”
With a building like this, said Kim, “maintaining the heritage element is really the most important thing. It makes up a significant portion of the work, and it’s more costly, but with these types of landmark buildings, you really can’t recreate; you have to restore.”
A highly functional entryway helps bring retail, office and academic space together under one roof in Central City, Surrey.
“The lobby experience really begins outside, with a new plaza located on the north side of the building,” said Michael Heeney, principal at Bing Thom Architects Inc. “We wanted to dissolve the inside and the outside, so we made the [five-storey curved glass entry wall] highly transparent and brought the paving patterns of the plaza into the lobby.”
Inside, where enormous wood columns support the glass façade, shoppers and students can see into Central City’s retail, Simon Fraser University (SFU) campus and office spaces, all three of which are spanned by a 70,000-square-foot space-frame roof composed of interlocking struts in a geometric pattern.
Heeney explained that the space frame is made up of peeler cores – waste byproducts of the plywood industry. He added that SFU’s curriculum focuses strongly on technology: “We wanted to reflect that [as well as] British Columbia in the design, so we ended up using wood, but using it in a high-tech way.”
Since its completion in 2004, Central City has netted Bing Thom several international awards. Yet, said Heeney, the biggest gains have come from the building’s success in establishing a new city centre for Surrey: “We always intended for Central City to serve as a catalyst to create a new urban core for Surrey. We wanted to connect a learning institution to the broader community, and … we are proud to have achieved this goal.”
This article was excerpted from the 2011 edition of Office Space magazine, which will be delivered with next week’s Business in Vancouver.