An Ottawa developer unveiled a design Tuesday by a distinguished Toronto architecture firm for a 42-storey condo tower on Preston Street that, if approved, will be the tallest building in Ottawa.
“It’s a fairly unique architectural statement to Ottawa,” said Neil Malhotra, vice-president of Claridge Homes. “We set out to do a really great building at the end of the canal. We wanted to do something different.”
An image shows a gleaming white and glass tower emerging from the green of the Queen Elizabeth Driveway and the openness created by Dow’s Lake.
With a base designed to relate to street scale, it looks like recent Toronto and Vancouver towers which rise from podiums comprising townhouses and other types of units. The Claridge project puts stores on the ground floor. The 128-metre-tall building includes two or three floors of offices, and 220 to 250 residential units.
After interviewing some of the top firms in the world, including London-based Foster + Partners and Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners, Claridge hired Hariri Pontarini, a leading firm in Toronto known for good design.
Hariri Pontarini’s award-winning projects include the Bahá’í Temple for South America, in Santiago, Chile, and the Schulich School of Business at York University.
The firm currently has three tall condo towers under construction in Toronto: One Bloor Street (75 storeys), Five St. Joseph Street (45 storeys) and Shangri-La (69 storeys.)
“We liked their ideas when we met with them,” said Malhotra. “Their reputation is top notch.
“If we’re going to build higher, we need to continue to improve design and produce new ideas,” he said. “There’s an onus on us to keep improving design especially as we go higher.”
Lead designer David Pontarini said the Preston Street building has two fronts, a middle and a top.
“It’s a building that’s trying to respond to the site by having a facade that faces the green space and then there’s a more urban aspect to it which is facing downtown Ottawa and Preston Street,” he said. “The elevation to the north will be more sculpted.
“It’s an area that’s in transition. It’s starting to look at how to deal with height and address the issue of height and part of that whole idea of connecting density to transit nodes.”
The site is close to the O-Train, and a proposed light-rail corridor.
Current zoning would allow a nine- or 10-storey building. Claridge will seek rezoning.
Pontarini is co-author of a study for the City of Toronto called “Tall Buildings: Inviting Change in Downtown Toronto,” which puts forth a vision for how tall buildings should be built in the city centre.
Claridge also met with multinational firms Perkins + Will and Kohn Pederson Fox.
Malhotra said they hope to build by 2017. “We’re just starting the process.”
