On the Rise

Creating vertical communities; the future of high density urban living in Toronto

by Richard Witt

The CG Tower steps away from the park creating smaller scale elements and a sense of home

The development pattern of cities in North America is changing. Traditional downtown cores are no longer emptying out at rush hour as workers drive home to surrounding bedroom communities; polycentric cities connected by multiple transit modes are the new norm. In the Greater Toronto Area, nowhere is this more evident than in the northern municipality of Vaughan. Previously a collection of small villages, Vaughan became a single city filled with cookie-cutter subdivisions for commuters.

Now it is just as quickly intensifying into a bustling urban centre. Vaughan is the destination for the first Toronto transit subway stop outside the city of Toronto proper, so seized the opportunity to reinvent itself with the high-density, 432-acre Vaughan Metropolitan Centre. Our client, Cortel Group, was the first to take advantage of the new planning framework with two 40-storey towers which seemed gigantic for the area when completed in 2017, but are now set to be surrounded by scores of similarly tall towers and further dwarfed by the fifth in their development: CG Tower, standing 60 storeys tall at 194.5m.

Massing studies

We know that the world is growing warmer. Sustainable building design is composed of active and passive responses, and while many active systems are more visually legible, they contribute significantly less to the building’s performance. Sustainable design isn’t about strapping windmills on roofs - the heavy lifting is done by the passive systems, and the primary factor in a tower is the building envelope. For this reason, we knew it would be imperative for CG Tower to have a high wall:window ratio, a building skin with real insulation. Although there are spandrel systems that fit within glazed window systems, they aren’t high in insulation value and we wanted to move beyond the obvious cheap and cheerful glass tower model. CG Tower is our response to climate change concerns centred around a quality building envelope, using passive systems which take advantage of transit-oriented compact urban form.

The aspiration from our client was that this tower “be like no other tower.” While that’s possible in Vaughan - which has fewer than ten towers, most of which are similar in aesthetic - we engaged in a study of tall building typology to understand what has not been done, and what would be possible in this context. We determined to base our landmark building design around the nature of vertical living and see where that led us.

The idea of living 40 or 50 storeys above the ground raises interesting questions around the nature of home and how that relates to our generally vernacular concept of what home is. Being mindful of that, we broke up the monolithic form of the tower into a series of smaller scale elements which step deferentially away from the park and establish an unusual building profile. This form also improves pedestrian level wind comfort, mitigating the downdraught effect, as air striking the tower is not able to accelerate while travelling down a monolithic form.

Brick was chosen as the primary façade material to make the connection between home and high-rise, an especially important consideration giventhe context of primarily low-rise, single family homes in Vaughan. We believed that brick = home in the subconscious of many residents and we wanted to transpose that familiar comfort. Brick has the added advantage of aiding multi-faceted perceptions of the building – from the distant warm hued profile on the skyline to the fine-grained textured clay surface and modular composition.

High-rise living is increasing as available land is developed with ever-expanding density. Although popular in Asia for some time, these established typologies don’t transpose well into our cultural norms, so we are evolving housing at height which is rooted in western culture. How that will progress remains to be seen, but we do know that it will need to respond to sustainable design through all three lenses of sustainability; ecological, social and economic.

A-Z Tower Study; Initial building typology studies involved a rigorous experiment with form orientation, terraces and breaking down/subdivision of volumes