The Vancouver House and the Telus Sky towers were photographed for the first time since their debut in 2020 during the pandemic by the Danish architecture firm BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group. Both buildings are created by a curved silhouette that incorporates the surroundings like a huge curtain, revealing the structure to the skyline, and creating a sort of “yin and yang.” Its curved shape is intended to add variety to the skyline, which is often made up of corporate office skyscrapers and streets designed for automobiles. The skyscraper was designed to represent the transition between the building’s office and residential uses.
THE BIG
Bjarke Ingels Group, often known as BIG, has developed a high-rise building in Berlin‘s East Side and is collaborating with HWKN on a commercial district in London. In 2022, the worldwide company CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati opened CapitaSpring Tower in Singapore. The 280-meter-tall high-rise oasis, which took four years to build, is one of the city’s highest buildings and has received Universal Design Gold Plus and Green Mark Platinum certifications. BIG has designed many well-known skyscrapers and other structures around the world, including the wavy Vancouver House skyscraper.
The Buildings
Both the 149-meter-tall Vancouver House and the 220-meter-tall Telus Sky tower contain offices and residences with a mix of uses, and their platforms have access to bicycle and pedestrian walkways. The highest level of Energy and Environmental Design is also held by both. The first LEED Platinum structure in the city is called Vancouver House, and TELUS in Calgary now has the biggest LEED Platinum footprint in North America at 70,725 square meters.
Calgary and Vancouver have started an urban experiment to build an extremely dense downtown. While Alberta is centered on a cluster surrounded by low-density housing, the largest city in western Canada built a densely populated core. In either form, both buildings serve as examples of how to approach urban planning from a combination of living and working spaces, fulfilling the community’s need for an urban development that is genuinely sustainable and vibrant.
Vancouver House
Basic Information
Name of the Project: Vancouver House
Place: Vancouver, Canada
Year: 2012
Client: Westbank Projects Corporation
Typology: Residential
Size: 60,758 m2
Status: Completed
In the brief but fruitful history of urban policy in the city, Vancouver House represents a new chapter. A new urbanist platform with a slender tower that strives to retain view cones through the city while energizing the pedestrian street, the tower and base is a new interpretation of the regional typology known as “Vancouverism.”
The Granville bridge, a nearby park, and the tower’s location at the entry to Vancouver all impose setback requirements on the tower’s site. What was left was a tiny triangular site that was almost insufficient for construction. The 30-meter separation from the bridge was intended to be the absolute minimum gap before the structure could expand once it reached a height of 30 meters in the air, which would have allowed BIG to double the floor plate. As a result, Vancouver House gradually rises from the ground, opening up new views of Vancouver‘s expansive natural surroundings. What appears to be an absurd gesture is a very dynamic building that is influenced by its surroundings.
Telus Sky
Basic Information
Name of the Project: Telus Sky
Place: Calgary, Canada
Year: 2021
Client: Westbank Projects Corporation, Telus, Allied Development Corporation
Typology: Residential, Work
Size: 70606 m2
Status: Completed
The Telus Sky tower transforms Calgary‘s city center, which was built as a traditional North American Center with a cluster of corporate towers surrounded by a periphery of low urban density suburban residences, into a vibrant mix of living and working areas. Since the car is a central element of Calgary Downtown, its programmatic consistency results in a nighttime population decline as individuals head home. The 60-story mixed-use tower stacks the houses on an office tower and is located at a light rail and arterial road crossing. By stacking the houses on an office tower, Telus Sky creates a programmatically diverse complex that is active throughout the day.
The diagonal shift, which continues the ground floor’s orthogonality, pixelates the façade and gives the residents their patios and balconies. The pixels of the façade above the main entry extends beyond the boundaries of the site, becoming a network of canopies, decks, and lounges woven across the corner. The tower’s north and south facades are illuminated at night by a 15,000 square meter art installation called “Northern Lights” by Douglas Coupland, making it Calgary’s largest piece of public art.
CONCLUSION
The objective of the urban experiment being conducted by Telus and Vancouver is to build a very dense urban core. Both towers serve as an illustration of how an urban design that combines sustainable living and working spaces can meet the community’s expectations for truly sustainable and lively urban growth.
Bibliography
BIG. (2022, 11 8). BIG PROJECTS. Retrieved 11 22, 2022, from BIG: https://big.dk/
Cano, P. (2022, 11 8). BIG Releases First Photographs of The Vancouver House and Telus Sky in Canada. Retrieved 11 22, 2022, from ArchDaily: https://www.archdaily.com/991864/big-releases-first-photographs-of-the-vancouver-house-and-telus-sky-in-canada
Ikiz, S. U. (2022, 11 18). BIG published the first photographs of the Telus Sky and Vancouver House. Retrieved 11 22, 2022, from Parametric Architecture: https://parametric-architecture.com/big-published-the-first-photographs-of-the-telus-sky-and-vancouver-house/
