World's Tallest Building Designer Takes On Waterfront
Cadillac Fairview is moving ahead on Waterfront Tower. A development application was submitted last week for a 26-storey office building at 555 West Cordova St. We just finished reading All My Puny Sorrows, so we picked up the application instead and learned it describes the proposed building as “prismatic,” and it's aimed at better connecting the city and waterfront. The site's currently a parking lot between two heritage buildings: Waterfront Station and The Landing, a 1905 warehouse. The tower is the creation of B+H Architects with international firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, designers of Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Tower, the world’s tallest building when completed in 2019. (It may be the universe's tallest, but we don't have the budget to check.)
The origami-inspired Waterfront Tower will be sculpted to maintain distance from the Waterfront Station building, and, with its tapered base, to allow for the future Cordova Street connector, as envisioned in the city’s plan for the Central Waterfront Hub. There will also be publicly accessible space on three sides of the tower—including a landscaped plaza with seating and water features—and the building will be set back from Cordova to allow views to the adjacent heritage buildings and create a more generous approach to the new tower’s entrance.
