Building February March 2012

Refining PLUS: Reinventing public consultation Commemorating the War of 1812

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60th Anniversary 1952 - 2012

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Contents

Features

Fast, Cheap(er) and Out of In Control / There were no ties, but lots of tablets and laptops and non-stop discussions about the cloud, infinite computing, mobile devices and collaboration at Autodesk University 2011 in Las Vegas.

By Peter Sobchak | Page 27

Refined Wine in Old and New Bottles / Three new city halls in southern Ontario are all quite different yet combine local awareness with attachment to simplicity of form and expression. By Rhys Phillips | Page 18

Departments

Let’s Talk / The tricky, often painful realm of public consultation is changing from a “have-to-do” to a “want-to-do,” and those not pushing its boundaries may be doing a disservice to the communities they govern or seek to build within.

By Andrew Sobchak | Page 14

Inside the Past / To commemorate the War of 1812 bicentennial, Reich+Petch Architects helped the St. Lawrence Parks Commission and others enhance the on-site immersive experiences of their historic monuments and forts. By Tyler Davie | Page 25 www.building.ca

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Editor’s Notes | Page 5 Market Watch | Page 10 Infosource | Page 29

Upfront | Page 7 Legal | Page 12 Viewpoint | Page 30

Above: Northeast view of Hamilton City Hall. Photo by Jesse Colin Jackson.

Cover: Vaughan Civic Centre clock tower. Photo by Maris Mezulis.

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Life after the back cover…

what’s on BUILDING.ca Read

Potential Impact of Climate Change on the Building Envelope

PR 101, pt. 4: What to say when you have nothing (new) to say

Where is the conserve in Harper’s Conservatives?

There are early signs appearing of what is commonly referred to as the effect of climate change on new and existing buildings. Brian Burton, an R&D specialist and a certified CGSB/ICPI Construction Inspector, explains how any significant change in weather patterns will almost certainly require a modification to the manner in which we design, construct, manage and maintain buildings.

In his ongoing series of columns providing PR tips for design-related firms, David Lasker, president of David Lasker Communications and associate editor of Canadian Interiors, explains how to drum up interest when there’s nothing new or world-record-setting to write about.

Attitudes have changed, and Canadian leaders need to keep up.

Explore

“Prime Minister Harper’s 1960s piano tunes may be timeless, but his single-minded approach to developing new energy supply is long out of fashion.”

Jeff Murdock, vice-president of Building Insight Technologies Inc.

Take a closer look at the new architectural and design features of the Hamilton City Hall and Milton Town Hall, both by +VG Architects.

Follow Attend Light+Building 2012 / April 15-20 / Frankfurt, Germany Coverings 2012 / April 17-20 / Orlando, Florida 15th Annual Sustainable Building Symposium / May 3 / Calgary ULI Real Estate Summit at the Spring Council Forum / May 8-10 / Charlotte, North Carolina 4 BUILDING February/March 2012

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Sign up for our weekly e-newsletter, full of fresh news, stories, videos, slideshows and more, only available on our website.

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Volume 62 Number 1 Editor Peter Sobchak Art Director Stephen Ferrie Legal Editor Jeffrey W. Lem Contributors Sheri Craig, Tyler Davie, Rhys Phillips, Andrew Sobchak Circulation Manager Beata Olechnowicz Tel: (416) 442-5600 ext 3543 Reader Services Liz Callaghan Advertising Sales Greg Paliouras Tel: (416) 510-6808 Email: gpaliouras@Building.ca Senior Publisher Tom Arkell Vice President, Publishing Business Information Group (BIG) Alex Papanou President, Business Information Group (BIG) Bruce Creighton Building magazine is published by BIG Magazines LP, a division of Glacier BIG Holdings Company Ltd. 80 Valleybrook Dr. Toronto, ON M3B 2S9 Tel: (416) 510-6845 Fax: (416) 510-5140 E-mail: info@building.ca Website: www.building.ca SUBSCRIPTION RATE: Canada: 1 year, $30.95; 2 years, $52.95; 3 years, $64.95 (plus H.S.T.) U.S.: 1 year, $38.95 (U.S. funds) Elsewhere: 1 year, $45.95 (U.S. funds).

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60

AND COUNTING

1952

was the year Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, Vincent Massey was sworn in as the first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada, and the U.S. detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb. The Baby Boomer generation was emerging, and it was a time when most Westerners considered themselves to be prospering. Average Canadian workers earned just under $60 a week, most families owned a car and a telephone, and house builders were frantically trying to keep up with the surging demand. “There were about 150,000 marriages during 1951. Immigration stood at the highest point since before World War I, probably including 35,000 family units among the 170,000 newcomers,” said editor Edward C. Smith in the March 1952 edition of the brand new Canadian Builder, the granddaddy to this magazine.

1952 was the year Canadian Builder hit full stride. This robust black-and white produced

by Holliday Publishing Limited out of Montréal would go on to cover all aspects of the Canadian construction and real estate development industries, and bear witness to the radically evolving face of this country.

And of course evolution happened to the magazine as well. It has changed owners, headquarters, and even names over its 60 years: Canadian Builder became Canadian Building, and eventually settled on Building. As I am sure Smith and many of the subsequent editors of this magazine have said in one way or another, the only constant is change. So it should be no surprise that Building is undergoing some changes as well. The most obvious will be a sleek new look between the covers, executed by the deft hands of Stephen Ferrie. And in honour of our 60th anniversary, for 2012 the Viewpoint department will be featuring key figures in Canadian real estate development that have lived, worked, and witnessed the progression of our industry during the lifetime of this magazine. Our first is Harold Shipp, chairman of Mississauga, Ont.-based Shipp Corporation, who began building and selling houses as a teenager in 1945, and is still going strong.

Some of our biggest advancements won’t be seen on the printed pages, however. As everyone alive today should attest, media’s biggest undiscovered country is the hyper-active world of the Internet. While Building has had a website for years, in 2012 our online content will be super-charged with various media including photos, videos and sound bites in addition to fresh news and stories only available on our website and weekly e-newsletter. Early 2012 also saw the launch of our social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, in order to do as Jeff Jarvis, author of the 2009 bestseller What Would Google Do suggests: “elegantly organize” what already happens in our workplaces, shopping malls, at home, over the phone and everywhere else in our lives – people talk to people. Simply put, social media facilitates these conversations, and we want to have a conversation with you, our reader.

A lot has happened over the past 60 years, and looking forward, there’s going to be even more to talk about.

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Peter Sobchak Editor

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UPFRONT

EllisDon to build new Ryerson University Student Learning Centre MISSISSAUGA— EllisDon has been chosen by Ryerson University as the Construction Manager to build its new Student Learning Centre in downtown Toronto. The 155,463-sq.-ft., eightstorey building at the corner of Yonge and Gould Streets includes an impressive glass façade and will be a significant contributor to the revitalization of the city’s core. Ground is expected to be broken on the $112-million project early next year and construction is expected to be completed by winter 2014.

“The Student Learning Centre will be a truly transformative space where our students can collaborate, create and innovate,” said Sheldon Levy, president of Ryerson University. “We’re delighted to partner with EllisDon, one of Canada’s leading construction firms, to build this centre. They were chosen because of their extensive building experience in the education sector, the quality of their team and the commitment that they have shown to Ryerson on this complex project.”

The building will be a stunning addition to the city and the university campus, providing students with a variety www.building.ca

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of space for individual and group study.

Along with the glass façade, there will be an elevated plaza, a bridge connecting to the existing Library and academic, study and collaborative spaces. The ground floor will feature prominent commercial retail space facing outwards onto Yonge Street.

International architectural team Zeidler Partnership Architects of Toronto, and Snøhetta of Oslo, Norway, designed the building and unveiled the renderings to the Ryerson community last April. “With the investment of $45 million from the province, and the talent and expertise of our partners EllisDon and our fine team of architects, this building will make a bold statement on Yonge Street and help to rejuvenate the heart of this city,” said Julia Hanigsberg, vice president, Administration and Finance, Ryerson University.

CaGBC’s streamlined LEED Canada certification plan aims to shorten the process OTTAWA— The Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) has made changes to the LEED Canada certification process that it hopes will streamline certification to less than six months. To better meet the large

market demand for LEED certification in Canada, the CaGBC has already increased internal staff to address the majority of backlogged projects and delayed Credit Interpretation Requests (CIRs). In addition, the CaGBC hired four new review teams, bringing the total to six teams who are now working to certify projects.

Based on recommendations made by a taskforce established in June 2011, changes to the certification process include: shortening the three-stage certification pathway to two stages for LEED Canada NC 1.0 and LEED Canada CS 1.0 projects; investing in technology infrastructure to improve the administration of certification; and introducing a design review process.

LEED Canada NC 2009 and LEED Canada CS 2009 projects will have the option of submitting design-stage credits and prerequisites immediately following design. The design review will allow issues to be addressed while the relevant parties are still engaged. It will also provide teams with greater clarity as to the likely outcome of certification, and allow for adjustments to be made before final certification.

Delays in certification also stem from the failure of applicant teams to respond to certification reviews in a timely manner.

To streamline LEED certification, the CaGBC will be introducing measures to help encourage quicker response times from applicant teams.

To assist applicant teams seeking certification, CaGBC offers a ‘Speed up Your LEED Certification: Getting it Right the First Time’ interactive workshop that discusses the more complex documentation requirements. Additionally, early in 2012 CaGBC will offer an on-demand online session addressing the process associated with certification.

Canadian Construction Association applauds federal infrastructure announcement OTTAWA— The Canadian Construction Association (CCA), a national nonresidential construction association February/March 2012 BUILDING 7

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UPFRONT representing over 17,000 members in a structure of some 70 local and provincial construction associations, welcomed the federal government’s strategy to develop a successor program for the current Building Canada Plan. “This will ensure that there will be no federal funding gaps when the existing Building Canada Plan expires in March of 2014,” said Michael Atkinson, president of CCA. CCA members have long advocated a federal leadership role in the development of a long-term national plan for the management and renewal of Canada’s aging infrastructure. The introduction of the Building Canada Plan was welcomed by the Canadian construction industry. “[The] announcement reconfirms this government’s intent to remain a longterm funding partner in the development and management of infrastructure across Canada,” said Atkinson.

Grosvenor Americas acquires office/retail building in Calgary CALGARY— Grosvenor Americas has acquired 1520 Fourth Street in Calgary’s Beltline district through Avison Young Commercial Real Estate. This 10-storey, 106,000-sq.-ft. office building includes 24,000 square feet of retail space and a 34,000-sq.-ft. surface parking lot that can be developed in the future. This brings Grosvenor Americas’ total acquisitions in 2011 to four.

1520 Fourth Street was built in 1974 and was acquired in 2005 by Great West Life, which invested over $2.3 million in capital improvements. Grosvenor Americas plans to spend approximately $1 million more for additional upgrades.

The property is located at the intersection of 4th Street, a main arterial

leading into the city centre from the south, and 17th Avenue, the Beltline’s main commercial corridor. It is just eight blocks from the central business district, with extensive public transportation options. The building is more than 90 per cent leased, with office tenants including government, accounting, oilfield services, education, and several restaurants.

Despite Canadian and global economic uncertainty, Calgary’s economy and commercial real estate market are thriving, with more than 86,000 jobs created in Calgary in 2011 (according to Statistics Canada). Calgary’s unemployment rate of 5.4 per cent is well below the national unemployment rate of 7.4 per cent.

HOOPP plans major office, retail development on 33acre property TORONTO— The Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) has acquired a 33-acre property near Pearson International Airport, and is planning to develop more than 1.1 million square feet of office space, and 75,000 square feet of commercial space. The news comes on the heels of HOOPP receiving LEED Canada Gold certification status for its AeroCentre V development, located nearby.

The project will be a plus for Mississauga area businesses, says Lisa Lafave, HOOPP’s senior portfolio manager. “The project will cater to what businesses in the area have been seeking for many years – highperformance work environments with access to amenities and efficient public transportation connecting to the subway system.” HOOPP will work to high LEED standards on the new development, aiming for another Gold certification.

International ULI redevelopment competition selects Weston Village for revitalization grant TORONTO— Urban Land Institute (ULI) Toronto District Council, in partnership with Metrolinx and the City of Toronto, have announced that their joint submission titled John 8 BUILDING February/March 2012

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UPFRONT Street Revitalization/Streetscape Plan was selected as part of an international competition for ULI’s Urban Innovation Fund. The grant of $23,750, when matched by partner organizations, will inject between $75,000 and $85,000 to kick-start urban development and renewal of Weston Village, an area in need of revitalization.

Weston Village is a neighbourhood bounded by Weston Road and Lawrence Avenue in the city’s west end. As the area has been experiencing new immigrant growth, it has been challenged with a lack of private-sector development and revitalization that has benefited other Toronto neighbourhoods.

Selected for its early success and the high quality of proposed projects, the John Street Revitalization/Streetscape Plan calls for the transformation of John Street from a secondary commercial street into a vibrant avenue. Specifically, it provides for a venue for Weston’s popular farmers’ market; an improved environment for existing and future retail, restaurant and café opportunities; and a streetscape link between the commercial core and the heritage neighbourhood of Weston Village.

As a result of the grant, the required budget to commence the regeneration plan has been met. Metrolinx, Weston Road Business Improvement Area and a number of City of Toronto Divisions have committed to either match the grant financially or provide in-kind contributions.

The John Street Plan is one of the ‘quick-start’ initiatives identified during the Weston 2021 Technical Assistance Panel (TAP) conducted by ULI Toronto’s District Council, together with its two public-sector partners, the City of Toronto and Metrolinx. As part of a greater City of Toronto Weston 2021, the ULI TAP program was developed to bring together the finest industry expertise to determine how to best leverage the upcoming Metrolinx transportation hub and start the revitalization of a neighbourhood in need. Planned to begin operation in 2015, the Metrolinx Air Rail Link train service is designed to pass through the Weston Road www.building.ca

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area on route between downtown Toronto and Pearson International Airport.

As part of ULI’s 75th Anniversary Urban Innovation Fund program, 30 grants totalling $500,000 have been awarded to Urban Land Institute district and national councils. ULI contributed funds as grants to local ULI projects that recognize or launch innovative publicprivate partnerships that will advance the responsible use of land in building healthy, thriving communities worldwide over the next 75 years. The $500,000 provided by the ULI Foundation is the largest amount ever contributed by the Foundation to support a single funding round. This special one-year program takes the place of ULI’s Community Action Grant program, which will resume in 2013.

Safdie Architects to design mixed-use complex in Chongqing, China BOSTON— Safdie Architects has been chosen to design a 10 million square

foot mixed-use complex for a historically significant site at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, in the inland Chinese city of Chongqing. The project, which was also announced in Singapore and Hong Kong by development partners CapitaLand, CapitaMalls Asia, and Singbridge, will feature residential and office space as well as retail and cultural facilities, a service residence, a hotel, restaurants and clubs, a park, gardens, and hubs for land and water transportation, including ferry docking and landscaped boardwalks.

The design for this gateway site, by international architect Moshe Safdie, is inspired by the image of sailing ships on the river, and is intended to serve as a symbol of both Chongqing’s noble past as a trading center and its fast-growing future as one of China’s largest and most important modern cities. The outer curving glass façades of the project’s six towers, placed in a prow-like arc, will face the water to the north, while decked hanging gardens and a generous public park will link the complex to the city immediately to the south.

As a whole, the complex will consist of four residential towers and two central, identical towers that will house a service residence, a hotel, private residences, and office space and that will be linked midway by a distinctive garden bridge, containing within it the hotel lobby and restaurants.

All four residential towers terrace to the south, forming a continuous green façade toward the city. Beneath the park, the project will also feature four levels of shopping gallerias, as well as a conference center, theaters, and other cultural spaces.

The project, which is expected to have a total development cost of about $3.1 billion, will front upon what was once the foremost of Chongqing’s traditional city gates, where officials received imperial decrees from the Emperor. As the city’s initial dock area on the Yangtze, the location also represents the great tradition of the shipping highway, which has stoked this major inland city’s development from its beginning and now drives its contemporary evolution.

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MARKET WATCH Real estate sentiment drops to lowest level since late 2009; respondents reporting modest improvement in market conditions TORONTO— Results from the Fourth

Quarter 2011 REALpac / FPL Canadian Real Estate Sentiment Survey, produced by the Real Property Association of Canada (REALpac) and FPL Advisory Group, indicate that the fourth quarter of 2011 brought a material change in views on the health of the real estate sector. The overall real estate sentiment index has dropped to its lowest level since late 2009 and respondents are reporting a modest improvement in market conditions but few (30 per cent) expect any further improvement in 2012. However, it is important to note that the Sentiment Index measures the market trajectory and is scored from 0-100, meaning scores above 50 reflect positive trends and score below 50 reflect negative trends. 2011 Q4 was the ninth straight quarter in which the Index was above 50.

In Q4, the Current Index dropped to 64 (from 71) and the Future Index fell to 55 (from 61) reflecting respondent per-

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spectives that market conditions, while still positive, are not expected to improve materially in 2012. Notably, many respondents felt that while the Canadian market has weathered recent events in the U.S. and EU they are not immune from global economic events.

When the Overall Sentiment Index for Canada is compared to that of the United States, there remain similarities, though the Canadian Current Index reflects slightly stronger fundamentals while the Future Index is slightly lower than its U.S. peer. The Overall U.S. Sentiment Index registered a 59 in Q4 (down from 69 in Q3 and 77 in the second quarter), reflecting a continued decline.

As the indices have dropped, interviewees also reported a sense of caution in the marketplace. As one interviewee noted, “There is certainly more perceived risk today in world financial markets. The fallout from that uncertainty is a slower pace of transaction activity, more difficulty in obtaining new financing, and hesitancy on the part of users. To me that implies slower growth in strong price markets.” Another felt the market conditions were worse for small players. “General market conditions are tough, espe-

cially for smaller players. There is lots of caution out there and it is definitely not a bull view.”

Asset Prices Real estate asset values have continued to trend upwards, with a vast majority of respondents (90 per cent) reporting increased asset values over the past year.

However, most (58 per cent) expect flat pricing going forward and an increasing group (now 18 per cent) is expecting a small decline in asset values. However, one respondent noted an increasing bifurcation between top tier and second tier assets: “Good quality, institutional grade pricing is still on the rise and we are still experiencing some cap rate compression; however, with regard to the second tier assets, the market is not as deep.”

Debt Markets Availability of debt capital continues to be widely available, although several respondents noted that a tightening of underwriting standards has continued to limit LTV ratios. As one respondent noted, “Because most of our [residential and multi-family] stuff is CMHC insured, [debt availability] is a slam dunk, I don’t

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MARKET WATCH see this changing; however, the CMHC is being more conservative with their underwriting. Now you can only get 70 per cent financing whereas you used to be able to get 75 per cent in certain markets.”

Respondents were slightly less positive than they were about 2011 Q3 in terms of overall availability, 42 per cent (versus 46 per cent in Q3) felt debt availability was somewhat better than a year ago. Most respondents (65 per cent) expect conditions to remain the same over 2012.

Equity Markets Although slightly less positive than Q3, the equity market still appeared to be strong in Q4, with little room for improvement over 2012. However, as with asset pricing we are seeing a bifurcation of availability; smaller firms are having slightly more trouble accessing capital when compared to large REITs with the large amount of capital on hand that is necessary to purchase the top tier institutional grade assets. Albeit at slightly higher discounts, capital raising has continued in the REIT sector, as one interviewee noted; “Canadian REITs are still doing capital raising; the discount has increased somewhat, but we are still seeing reasonable fund flows.” In Q4, respondents were almost equally split on expectations of future equity availability, with the majority (55 per cent) expecting conditions to remain the same over 2012.

The Q4 2011 survey captured the thoughts of 50 leading real estate executives, including CEOs, presidents, board members, and other leading executives from a broad set of real estate sectors including owners and asset managers, financial services providers, and building operators and related service providers. Survey respondents represent income producing real estate including office buildings, retail shopping centres, industrial buildings, hotels, multi-family residential (apartment buildings), and seniors’ residences.

This quarterly economic survey serves as a gauge of senior real estate executives’ confidence in financial and real estate markets in Canada. The REALpac/FPL Canadian Real Estate Sentiment Survey measures executives’ current and future www.building.ca

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outlook in three areas including overall real estate conditions, real estate asset values, and availability of capital. Three Sentiment Indices comprise the survey including a Current Conditions, Future Conditions and Overall Conditions Index.

National housing starts predicted to decline in 2012 due to deteriorating economic conditions TORONTO— Subdued economic growth will take the sizzle out of Canadian housing starts in 2012, according to the October 2011 Housing Forecast issued by Altus Group. Deteriorating global economic conditions leading to lower Canadian growth expectations will constrain housing demand across the country, with only Alberta expected to see an increase in housing starts.

“Based on recent data, the Canadian housing sector is performing at a very high level, with elevated housing starts, steady prices, and steady resale markets.

Interest rates are also no longer expected to increase over the next year,” said Altus Group chief economist Peter Norman.

“But at the same time a number of risk factors are emerging, especially deteriorating economic conditions and tighter mortgage rules. Canadians can expect lower levels of housing construction in most areas of the country [in 2012].”

Apartment starts continue to drive housing market 2011 saw an increase in Canada-wide housing starts over 2010, with apartment starts off-setting lower single-family homes, particularly in British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia. However, in 2012, apartment starts will begin to fall back and single-family starts will continue to moderate, creating an overall drop.

The report also found that inventories of existing homes have declined in most markets over the past year, resulting in less competition for new home starts.

Key factors impacting housing starts by region Altus Group looked at regional trends

across the country for the coming year: Alberta saw job conditions and interprovincial migration rise sharply in 2011 (at the expense of Ontario and British Columbia), which will positively impact housing demand in 2012.

However other areas of the country will experience lower starts, including Atlantic Canada, where migration will continue to be impacted by the weak economy, which will hamper new housing demand. “In Atlantic Canada, although Newfoundland continues to fire on all cylinders, sharply deteriorating job levels in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have led to much weaker migration and already weakening conditions in the housing sector,” said Norman.

In Montréal, higher inventories and units under construction will limit apartment starts, and in Regina and Saskatoon new home inventories are slightly elevated and will limit starts.

Other areas of the country are expected to see pockets of modest growth. “Condominium apartment sales remain elevated in Toronto, albeit strongly influenced by investor purchases, but deteriorating migration, weakening job growth and other factors will see a softer housing market with modestly lower housing starts for apartments and single family homes in Ontario next year,” Norman forecasts.

In Manitoba, despite some market softening, strong levels of migration will continue to fuel housing demand. In British Columbia the transition rules for the removal of the HST on housing have yet to be announced, but will likely cause delays for home buyers of higher-end homes.

House prices remain stable The report also found that increases in new house prices remain stable across the country and are in line with the general inflation rate in most provinces, aside from Alberta where there is little change, and British Columbia where they are declining.

Existing home sales posted a modest uptick. Prices for building products including brick, gypsum and lumber remain soft. Asphalt prices continue to be influenced by higher crude oil prices.

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LEGAL

Lease Remedies Come Full Circle

By Jeffrey W. Lem

Canadian commercial leasing has, for the past four decades, been dominated by a single case, Highway Properties v Kelly Douglas. Notwithstanding a constant clamouring for a more progressive and modern treatment of commercial leasing, the Ontario Court of Appeal has gone full circle by re-affirming the “old school” remedies endorsed in Highway Properties.

I

n Canadian commercial leasing, the entire universe of what a landlord can or cannot do to a defaulting tenant was summed up in a single decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1971. In that seminal case, Highway Properties Ltd. v. Kelly, Douglas & Co. Ltd., Canada’s highest court affirmed that a commercial landlord had at its disposal three historic remedies: i) they could do nothing to the lease, even if the tenant threatens to abandon the premises, and instead periodically sue the tenant in “installment litigation;” ii) the landlord could terminate the tenancy (i.e. re-enter the premises and evict the tenant); iii) the landlord could re-let the premises on behalf of the tenant (and then sue from time to time for any deficiencies in rent).

These three remedies arose as a natural consequence of a lease being a historic form of conveyance of real estate. The Highway Properties case did not establish these traditional conveyancing remedies, they were rather a long-standing reflection of the common law. All Highway Properties actually did was reaffirm the availability of the three conveyancing remedies and introduce the now infamous “fourth remedy” -- the right on the part of the landlord to sue the tenant, on notice, for consequential damages arising from the premature loss of the lease.

Prior to the introduction of the “fourth remedy” in Highway Properties, landlords could still always get their leased premises back through an eviction; however, that same landlord could not then also pursue a claim against the evicted tenant for the 12 BUILDING February/March 2012

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full measure of damages incurred by the landlord as a result of the tenant’s default.

For instance, if the unexpired lease term was significant and the rent payable was well over the market rent, then a landlord would want damages for loss of profit rather than just getting the premises back.

Likewise, if the tenant had been an “anchor tenant” who’s business function was to attract other businesses to the landlord’s site, simply getting the keys back to the leased premises would be cold comfort in light of the economic damage that the landlord might face as a consequence of an anchor tenant’s default.

Highway Properties revolutionized commercial leasing by giving landlords the supplemental right to also sue any abandoning tenant for all of the consequential damages in addition to the return of the leased premises to the landlord. The addition of this right has led to the characterization of commercial leases as a hybrid of both contract and conveyancing law (since the landlord did not have to terminate and sue for consequential damages and could always rely on the “old school” conveyancing remedies – most notably to do nothing to the lease and just sue for arrears of rent).

Although this hybrid characterization of a commercial lease has been a central tenet of Canadian landlord and tenant law since Highway Properties, it is far from a universally accepted way of looking at commercial leases. By rough count, while approximately half of the U.S. states still cling to a Highway Properties type of hybrid characterization, the remaining

states have adopted a more uni-dimensional characterization of a commercial lease, preferring to view it a subspecies of commercial contract. Under this “modern” or “contract” approach, landlords retain the right to sue for consequential damages but lose the right to sit back and do nothing after a tenant has attempted to repudiate the lease – under pure contract theory, once the lease is repudiated, the contract is broken and the innocent counterparty immediately attracts a duty to mitigate its damages.

There has been a consistent torrent of academic commentary on this subject in Canada since Highway Properties, with most academics favouring a conversion from the “hybrid” model posed in Highway Properties to the “pure contract” approach now adopted in many U.S. states.

That said, to this author’s knowledge, no court or legislature in Canada has actually overturned Highway Properties (nor is it apparent to this author how any court other than another panel of the Supreme Court of Canada could do so!).

There is, however, one case from British Columbia that purported to reverse the “hybrid” characterization called for in Highway Properties. This 2005 B.C. case, Evergreen Building Ltd. v. IBI Leaseholds Ltd., was widely touted as a Highway Properties killer, the case that would shed the Canadian law of commercial lease remedies of its cumbersome conveyancing roots and propel the law, once and for all, into the modern era of “pure contract” remedies, and that is precisely what the British Columbia Court of Appeal apwww.building.ca

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LEGAL peared to do (although in a very indirect, convoluted way). Evergreen was, however, granted leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the stage seemed set for a showdown over Highway Properties. Alas, the parties in Evergreen settled before the Supreme Court of Canada could revisit the issue, leaving many leasing lawyers wondering whether the British Columbia Court of Appeal’s take in Evergreen is now the new normal.

Practitioners, at least in Ontario, need wonder no further. While Evergreen was never binding in Ontario, the recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Re: TNG Acquisitions Inc., seems to have laid to rest, at least for the time being, the nature of a commercial lease under Ontario law. Madam Justice Gillese, writing for a unanimous panel that included Laskin J. (Jr.), reaffirmed the characterization of the commercial lease as a “hybrid” or “dual” instrument that is both a conveyance and a contract, upholding the characterization that the senior Justice Laskin

espoused in Highway Properties some 40 years prior.

In TNG, the tenant had attempted to repudiate the lease, but the landlord had elected to do nothing in response (as was its right under the conveyancing remedies endorsed in Highway Properties), only to find its tenant retaliating with bankruptcy, and the trustee-in-bankruptcy subsequently disclaiming the lease, leaving the landlord with nothing more than a preferred claim under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. In an almost counterintuitive strategy, it was the landlord (not the tenant), that argued in TNG that Highway Properties was a dead doctrine and that the modern commercial lease had to be interpreted as a species of pure contract instead. Strategically, the landlord was likely better off financially in the tenant’s bankruptcy as a creditor with an unsecured claim for damages from a breached lease, rather than as a landlord with a valid lease and a preferred (but statute-limited) claim; therefore, it was necessary for the

landlord to argue that the lease, as a pure contract, would have been automatically terminated upon repudiation by the tenant, all without requiring an election on the part of the landlord.

By endorsing the effectiveness of the historic conveyancing remedies (most notably, the right to do nothing after a tenant purports to repudiate a commercial lease), even when faced with a landlord that is pleading that it does not want the benefit of such a remedy, the Court of Appeal in TNG has fended off, yet again, another attempt to erode one of the most fundamental tenets of Canadian commercial leasing law. Yes, commercial leasing lawyers are a geeky lot. Long live Highway Properties!

Jeffrey W. Lem is a partner in the Toronto/ Markham offices of Miller Thomson LLP, a national law firm with 11 offices across Canada. Jeffrey is Certified by the Law Society of Upper Canada as a Specialist in Real Estate and can be reached at jlem@ millerthomson.com.

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k l a T s ' t e L The tricky, often painful realm of public consultation is changing from a “have-to-do” to a “want-to-do,” and those not pushing its boundaries may be doing a disservice to the communities they govern or seek to build within.

By Andrew Sobchak

W

hen anyone mentions the phrase “public consultation,” a well-worn stereotype comes to mind of disenfranchised middle-agers crowding into a lowslung, grey and uninspiring Committee Room, lining up to a microphone for three short minutes in which to recommend action or, more commonly, complain about inadequacies with regards to process, funding, regulations and a myriad of other bellyaches. As the madding crowd struggles to be heard, at the front of the room sit a growinglyexasperated committee tasked with gleaning some useful feed14 BUILDING February/March 2012

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back. In the end, neither side feels anything truly useful came from the confrontation.

This clichéd scenario was played out in exact detail on December 7, 2011 in Meeting #BU19.1 in Toronto City Hall, as 350 pre-registered citizenry attempted to comment on the 2012 Capital & Operating Budget during what was expected to be a 12-hour marathon “public consultation” meeting. Not surprisingly, no one was happy.

Although this particular meeting was to discuss city budgets, it should appear frustratingly familiar to anyone in the real estate development industry. “I don’t think it’s a revelation www.building.ca

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Public Consultation

to say that most citizens are underwhelmed with the way local governments consult with them about development applications” opines Kent Munro, assistant director of planning for the City of Vancouver. “The old style, the Tuesday evening town hall meeting in the school gym is well past its best-before date.” Lacking convenience and a competitive edge over the other demands in people’s lives, most everyone would agree that public consultation – especially in the development world – needs a makeover.

Five days after the debacle at Toronto City Hall, just such a makeover was taking place, as David Dilks, president of Lura Consulting, was helping Waterfront Toronto facilitate their first of three evening Port Lands development public consultation sessions. The event attracted over 500 people to the bright and airy Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library, and an additional 100 through webcasting and social media, to discuss the development strategy for the 400-ha. industrial area perched on the shore of Lake Ontario.

With stakeholder presentations and small group break-out sessions facilitated by lead volunteers, attendees were prompted for their questions and weren’t shy about voicing opinions in an atmosphere that felt like a community trying to positively address a challenge. “It’s remarkable,” Dilks would say later in an interview. “The meeting brought together a great brain trust and the process made everyone feel useful.”

Public consultation takes many forms and practitioners across Canada, like Dilks, agree there is no single formula for success. However they would agree that there are frameworks, and operating within one can turn the former Dark Ages of public relations into a new frontier of opportunity. For the development industry, public consultation has failed for generations because it was perceived as both a costly endeavour and a management and political nightmare where control is often lost. Now, enterprising practitioners are digging deep to tap into the hidden resource of the public conscience, knowing the ingredients of success lie buried within it.

Framework over Formula: A place to start

In his 2011 book Creativity in Public Relations, Andy Green believes a successful public consultation framework simply requires assembling the right audience, sincerely listening, and demonstrating you have listened. Michelle Chalifoux, Public Engagement Program Manager at the City of Edmonton, tends to agree. “You have to be clear in scope and communication, value and consider input from all perspectives and report back. Tell the public what you’ve heard and what you plan to do with it.”

In 2006, the City of Edmonton formalized their framework with City Policy C513 and created the Public Involvement Office (PIO) whose mandate is to share best practices with and guide all other City departments. In doing so, they have transferred the burden of public consultation from the shoulders of those who may have no expertise in the field onto those of www.building.ca

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“It seems local governments have not brought the public engagement process for development applications into the 21st century.”

—Kent Munro experienced professionals who can add creativity where needed. In 2012, the PIO is working to extend the framework to include public engagement even when it is not part of a formal process. “It’s going to be exciting,” Chalifoux smiles.

Those government agencies without an internal Public Involvement Office often turn to the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) for inspiration. The 10-year-old organization had its first Canadian affiliate registered in 2011 and offers resources and tools to members looking to bring the industry from a tired past to a brighter future. Their cafeteriastyle menu suggests consultation techniques for a wide range of increasing public impact levels from information to empowerment, and each can be applied to a specific audience.

Get the Right People

Speaking with the right people in the first place is how Kent Munro defines success. “Our focus is more people and a better representative sample of broader geographies. To be blunt, our meetings historically have tended to attract disproportionate numbers of affluent, white, retired people and are not representative of the communities they were designed to engage,” he says. By developing mechanics to better assemble consultative groups, including participants from typically hard to reach demographics, he feels the City can use any number of engagement tools, from social media to web-enhanced dialogues to old-fashioned face-to-face meetings.

For Peter MacLeod, president of Toronto-based public consultation firm MASS LBP, one of the fundamental flaws of public consultation over the last few decades has been that it wasn’t ‘public’ at all. “For the most part,” he suggests, “public consultation has been just open consultation, largely not representing the public well.” Simply throwing open the doors to City Hall or an open house may look good if your metrics are only guest-book registrants, but may not be very constructive for community building.

MacLeod feels a better approach is connecting on a deeper level with smaller groups. Inspired by the organization of citizen assemblies in British Columbia and Ontario, MASS LBP February/March 2012 BUILDING 15

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engages participants through civic lotteries, sending out invites to a target audience and forming what MacLeod terms ‘Citizen Reference Panels’ of only the most committed. “Recently we had thousands of people from all over Ontario willing to convene in a windowless room at York University for 16 weekly sessions to discuss electoral reform,” notes MacLeod.

“People care, they just need to be engaged in the right way.”

Typical response rates for MASS LBP invitations are four to seven per cent, and they generally use only three criteria to discretize respondents: gender, geography and age. “Everything else comes out in the wash,” says MacLeod. Recent projects have included Metrolinx’s “The Big Move” and a community engagement strategy for Toronto Community Housing, but MacLeod sees using this approach in the land development industry as natural. “There are immense opportunities being missed with existing strategies and we’re looking forward to helping fill in those information gaps,” he says.

For the Public Involvement Office at the City of Edmonton using a framework makes sense. Out of this structure, applied over numerous consultation initiatives, specific and quantifiable metrics can be harvested and compared to determine relative success. “Ultimately we want the process to excite input from the public that we can then use in a meaningful way to impact whatever plan we are developing,” notes Chalifoux. “But we also use quantitative metrics to assess success of our programs.”

One of the key ways Chalifoux collects this data is through participant surveys. On their ongoing Southeast to West LRT line project, which started preliminary engineering in September 2011, they discovered some encouraging trends: 40 to 75 per cent of meeting participants were previously engaged in the process; 70 per cent of participants indicated a better understanding of the project because of their attendance; and the satisfaction in the consultation process was 20 per cent higher than the satisfaction with the plan. “This was indication that even though not everyone agreed with the decisions, they were more satisfied with the opportunity to contribute,” says Chalifoux. For the City of Edmonton, this defines success.

“Twitter is an echo chamber. Social media can complement public engagement but is not public engagement on its own.”

Although social media can make communication much more personal and direct, in Vancouver, Munro favours webbased tools over social media platforms. “Real-time info sharing has great promise,” he notes, citing successes with the Talk Vancouver-Shannon Mews pilot project as leading to changes on the City’s homepage.

In early 2011, Vancouver-based Perkins + Will Architects submitted a rezoning application for the historic Shannon Mews, a four hectare block at the corner of Granville Street and 57th Avenue, instigating some controversy. The development plan included replacing 162 existing townhouses with 735 condominium units in an array of seven buildings ranging from three to 10 storeys in height (pictured above). The application and subsequent debate prompted the City to revisit their public consultation strategy and pursue digital tools to engage the public in a multi-stage, multilingual discussion about the application. Using a predesigned content management platform called EngagementHQ, the City launched Talk Vancouver, where they host online discussions, post video content and manage events regarding the Shannon Mews application, which was subsequently approved in July, 2011. The Talk Vancouver project has blossomed to include forums on housing, transportation and the 2012 Budget and Capital Plan.

Social Media: No Silver Bullet

Land Development vs. Consultation

Measuring Success

Much of the public believe that having a social media icon at the bottom of a consultation website means they are engaged, but the truth is so few people know how to effectively use social media they bog down the consultation process with useless information. “Right now, social media can be useful for engaging youth or generating bulk input, but when consensus building is required, it tends to fall short,” notes Dilks.

MacLeod believes effective public consultation will never stray too far from face-to-face engagement. Some social media tools can help improve outreach, reduce confrontation or make contributions to discourse more convenient for some, but “hard public decisions require more than people in pyjamas,” he notes.

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Public consultation seems to work best when there is no clear direction, desire or strategy: more precisely when options remain on the table, and for Dilks, this is a problem. “For private bodies seeking one answer – essentially a seal of approval – public consultation won’t work. The results will be the same through minimum or maximum engagement.” This format creates confrontation and a dynamic to discourse that explains the failure of public consultation in the past.

The perception is that communities battle the private sector with government bodies refereeing in between, but with changes in approach and all parties understanding the value of public consultation, this perspective can evolve. “In Vanwww.building.ca

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Public Consultation

couver,” notes Munro, “developers enthusiastically participate when the process is fair and timely.” In urban land development, the private sector is just as interested in building the right solutions as the communities are to receive them.

“In my opinion, investing in community is the best form of public consultation,” says Frank Giannone, president of Mississauga-based FRAM Building Group. In 1998, FRAM purchased a 10.5-ha. lakefront property in Port Credit, Ont. from a developer who previously submitted a development application. “It was too dense and no one bought into the concept,” Giannone explains of the plan. “Fighting all the way, it eventually went to the Ontario Municipal Board.” The OMB advised the parties that if it was to make a formal ruling there would be “poison pills” in it for everyone. Subsequently, the developer withdrew the application and sold the property to FRAM. Knowing the ire of all stakeholders had been raised, Giannone realized if he was going to make this development project work, he had to make it right. He not only started collaborating with municipal authorities and the Port Credit Village Residents Association on the design, but started investing in the community by becoming a lead sponsor for local events and creating a foundation to support them long after project completion.

“Investing in the community opened the channels for dialogue naturally. Residents knew we were here to stay, actually cared about the neighbourhood and wanted to chat,” notes Giannone.

“Sure, as a developer, money is always important, but my metrics of success are seeing more people on the streets of Port Credit and more people at the community events.”

14 years, six independent projects and eight awards later, FRAM is constructing the final phase in the development -- a 22-storey, LEED candidate condominium. As FRAM moves toward project completion in Port Credit, the Residents Association reports “an unprecedented level of community animation,” and Giannone looks to take his hard-learned lessons to Calgary.

“Investing in the community opened the channels for dialogue naturally.

Residents knew we were here to stay, actually cared about the neighbourhood and wanted to chat.”

—Frank Giannone In that city and in collaboration with the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation, FRAM+Slokker Developments is helping revitalize the 49-acre derelict East Village where they will be developing four parcels and 600,000 square feet of mixed use and multi-family space. The first parcel is the aptly named www.building.ca

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FIRST, an 18-storey condominium tower overlooking the Bow River, which will introduce 191 homes (pictured above).

In total, all four parcels will bring 800 new units to the community, with occupancy expected in 2013.

“We’re just going to try and keep up,” chuckles Giannone when asked about the project’s plans for community engagement and social media presence, acknowledging Calgary’s hyper-active nature when it comes to public engagement, instigated by a forward-thinking mayor. For example, in 2011 Mayor Naheed Nenshi initiated a web-enabled public consultation that allowed all Calgarians to submit mock city budgets. This data was compiled and used to make real decisions on actual allocations of City funds.

Although FRAM has realized many soft benefits with their style of community engagements, Lura Consulting’s David Dilks sees the incentives for private sector in the immediate future remaining rooted in the approvals process. “Public engagement by a developer demonstrates due diligence. Going above the legislative requirement indicates you are a good player in the community, too. Both are valued by regulatory bodies.”

Because public consultation is immerging from a history of failure, especially in land development, there are significant opportunities for innovation. Dilks believes those companies that test new approaches or prompt governments to push the boundaries stand to reap the most benefit. “The more enlightened tend to improve the process,” he notes. “Inspiration for me in public consultation comes in part from working with clients like these who have a progressive vision. For Waterfront Toronto, public consultation was a deliverable; they wanted to get it right.”

Getting it right meant a three-pronged engagement strategy involving face-to-face meetings, stakeholder advisory groups and social media/web-enabled consultations. On January 10, 2012, Lura Consulting, in conjunction with project partners, released the first draft summary of December’s introductory session. With six common feedback themes, Dilks and Waterfront Toronto now know exactly where they fell short and where to apply more resources to ensure success. Building the right community is the common metric of success for all parties and public consultation is the lever to make it happen.

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T

he rapid urbanization of suburban communities, the re-emerging economic importance of the “city state” and the increasingly frenetic drive to be the next “creative city” has stimulated construction of many new city halls in Canada. Three recently-opened Ontario projects, including the restoration of Hamilton’s 1958 town hall, a significant addition to Milton’s previously adapted historic courthouse, and the major first step in an ambitious new civic complex for Vaughan are all quite different yet share a link with Canada’s post-war era of city hall building.

The importance of civic buildings has a long history. As significant urban centres emerged in the early years of Europe’s Middle Ages, city or town halls as a building type increased in importance, reflecting the growing secular and economic aspirations of the citizenry. Not incidentally, as the great urban theorist Spiro Kostis noted, these new structures were often constructed on the sites of Bishop’s palaces in the very heart of the emerging metropolis unlike nobles’ great halls which traditionally occupied the urban periphery. Cologne’s City Hall (1135), for example, both symbolized the emergence of an elected body in place of a hereditary aristocracy as well as functioning as a place to conduct business. It was ironic that physical centrality was subsequently appropriated by the divine right rulers, culminating in the hyper-centrality of Baroque city planning.

The less royally-infested city states of Europe’s northern lowlands, however, continued to play a key role. In Belgium the city halls of Brussels (with its 96 metre tower) and Leuven, 18 BUILDING February/March 2012

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both built in the 15th century, remain imposing civic symbols.

Once the Spanish yoke was discarded by the Netherlands in the 17th century, civic buildings remained the most important monuments symbolizing economic and at least limited democratic ideals over royal and ecclesiastical rule.

As the nation state supplanted the city state, structures symbolizing national political power grew in significance. But in the latter part of the 19th century the industrial and mercantile elites of many Ontario towns used public money to build speculatively grand city halls as economic instruments. Perhaps the grandest of these is Kingston’s marvellous neo-classical town hall (1844), with Colbourg’s elegant Victoria Hall (1856) remaining the best example of trying to punch above your weight.

In the end, Confederation helped marginalize Canadian cities and towns, a problem existing to this day, by making them mere creatures of the provinces. A new modern age of City Hall design, however, was ushered in by Vancouver with its Depression era tower (1936) outside the historic city core. Built in just nine months, its comparatively stripped down, Moderne office tower aesthetic signalled a new search for a business-like image rather than the traditional mix of politics, culture and community.

This desire for a corporate business image found full expression in the post-war flurry of new civic centres that embraced the so-called International style, a no-nonsense, stripped down and placeless modernism increasingly adopted by corporate clients. Fortunately, the civic itch to embellish frequently won out. Edmonton City Hall (1957, demolished 1992) has been termed “fussy” by architecture historian Harold www.building.ca

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Refined Wine in Old and New Bottles Three new city halls in southern Ontario are all quite different yet combine local awareness with attachment to simplicity of form and expression. By Rhys Phillips

Kalman for the sin of daring to use rich natural materials, robust forms, a frenetic roof line and bris soleils that gave the building scale and texture. While Ottawa’s town hall (1958) had a flatter but deftly patterned skin, its sense of floating above Green Island, its extruded raised council chamber and its wonderful twin Phoenix Rising fountains gave the building presence. Of course the big surprise was Toronto, that rejected proposed bland designs by local architects and instead handed the job of rebranding the city to Finnish architect Viljo Revell, winner of a 1958 landmark international design competition.

If St. John’s subsequent Brutalist city hall (1968) seemed a dead-end, the suburban municipality of Scarborough turned to a young Raymond Moriyama for a bold urban marker, perhaps also influenced by expressive Finnish modernism.

From 1980 to 2000, three seminal Canadian city halls reignited a return to the traditional role of providing a defining civic rather than corporate icon. Jones and Kirkland’s PostModernist Mississauga Hall (1987) gathered and compressed local farm forms and archetype shapes into an imposing pile that was to give this suburban wasteland a tangible anchor. KPMB’s Waterloo City Hall opened six years later, but eschewed overt historical references, using a rich pallet of materials on an animated assembly of humanely scaled forms that carved out a new, defining civic presence in a growing but bland city centre.

Bruce Kuwabara followed Waterloo with an equally lively but more casual composition of forms for Richmond City to create again a civic anchor, this time in a still emerging semi-urban core. He also astutely crafted details and materials to reflect its www.building.ca

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B.C. setting. In particular, the extensive use of exposed Douglas fir as structural elements pre-shadowed the rich use of native woods that has enriched recent west coast work.

It would appear, however, that the three recently completed projects suggest there still remains a taste for civic presence defined by refinement and restraint, but not blandness.

Hamilton: Born Again, a Modern Masterwork

Of all the post-war International Style city halls, perhaps the finest was Hamilton’s. Debunking the myth that the public sector stunts creativity, city architect Stanley Roscoe produced an elegant integration of bold, even playfully expressive forms that included refining Edmonton’s V-shaped main volume by unbalancing the fold point. At the same time, he countered with a similar but symmetrical fold in the extruded and elevated council chamber. Recessed glass and aluminum curtain walls on the front ensured a sense of depth as well as lightness.

Importantly, and unlike in Ottawa, the glazing treatment on the council chamber provided real and symbolic transparency while a geodesic dome skylight let natural light wash over the proceedings. On the side façades, the light curtain wall competed with smooth white marble planes thus balancing lightness and transparency with solidity and firmness.

Roscoe had no problem using bold colour. Working with an artist, he created broad, brilliantly coloured Italian glass mosaic spandrels in abstract patterns. This was carried over into the building’s stunning double height mezzanine floor in which a floating cantilevered staircase with aluminum risers and teak wood February/March 2012 BUILDING 19

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Cover story: Town Halls

details rose in front of a huge mural, just one of many throughout the building’s eight storeys. White and black marble and teak paneling added further richness and detail. Equally important, the Modernist landscaping surrounding the civic complex framed views and gave the building an enhanced presence in the downtown core. As Dereck Drummond has written in praise of Modern Canadian city halls, the kind of public outdoor space so often lacking in older town halls was created.

Despite the building’s quality, its need for renewal and modernization by 2000 was almost its undoing. Only the estimated cost of a new building saved Roscoe’s masterwork, although the alternative was only finally put to rest in 2007 when Mayor Fred Eisenberger’s last ditch effort for a new building failed. Even then controversy dogged the project with NORR Limited dismissed as the project architect as costs rose. Garfield-Jones & Hanham Architects was hired with associate architects McCallum Sather Architects Inc. and +VG Architects as the heritage consultants. The last firm replaced ERA Architects in 2008 after that firm resigned in protest over council’s decision to rescind part of its own heritage designation to permit the use of precast concrete panels instead of sourcing the original white marble or even mid-priced limestone. While +VG principle Paul Sapounzi elegantly defends the client’s insistence on cheaper concrete as consistent with the Venice Charter, there can be no question the decision was short-sighted and ficidiously provincial.

The challenge faced by the architect was to completely modernize the 170,000-sq.-ft. building to a green standard while retaining and revitalizing the building’s many period details. In addition to high performance insulation under the new concrete curtain wall and 4,000 square feet of green roof, the building incorporates a high performance argon gas curtain wall, significant use of natural light, integrated sun shades and connection to a district energy system. Not incidentally, almost half of the $74 million renovation budget was funded by the Federal Gas Tax Fund that focuses on environmentally friendly municipal projects. It is expected the building will use 35 per cent less energy.

But equally significant has been how much of the building’s details have been retained. “A key difficulty,” says Sapounzi in a telephone interview, “was so much of the technology used in the late 1950s, such as the glass and aluminum curtain wall system, were in their prototype phase; adapting these to new standards required careful work.” An example is the thin aluminum doors that had to be adapted to take code compliant crash bars. Each of the glass mosaic pieces was removed, numbered, cleaned and replaced while the original terrazzo floors were seamlessly patched and polished. Only subtle changes were made to the fine detailing of the stairs and their balustrades. Because fluorescent lights were in their infancy when first incorporated, replacements had to be handmade, he states. Finally, landscape architect Wendy Shearer restored the original formal landscaping that provides the building with its fine sense of place in the city.

Navigating the difficult waters of taking apart a heritage www.building.ca

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Previous spread: Vaughan Civic Centre west elevation (Photo by Maris Mezulis). Top: Views of Hamilton City Hall’s north elevation from Main Street. Middle: The lobby’s main cantilevered staircase, looking west. Above: Council chambers west elevation view from public seating. (Photos by Jesse Colin Jackson).

structure and reassembling its elements while also introducing programmatic adjustments (such as opening up the first floor for customer service functions) was complex. Success was achieved, says Sapounzi, by using an integrated team approach (ITA) that reduces risk for the client. American architect Don Prowler defines this value-engineered process as requiring the design team and all affected stakeholders to work together continuously, evaluating the design for “cost, quality of life, February/March 2012 BUILDING 21

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Cover story: Town Halls

future flexibility, efficiency, overall project impact, productivity, creativity and how the occupants will be enlivened.” Under the design/build leadership of ABE, a partnership of EllisDon and Black and McDonald, the project was finished on budget and ahead of schedule.

Milton: Counterpointing Modern with Heritage

Top, Middle, Above: Milton’s new Town Hall preserves the architectural heritage of the site and supports its traditional role as the civic heart. Its forms, materials and scale take their cue from the local context. (Photos by Jesse Colin Jackson).

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The town of Milton is still a relatively modest city located just east of the Niagara Escarpment. But it has grown rapidly in recent years, ballooning to 75,000 residents, a tripling in less than three decades. Although in 1985 +VG had adapted the town’s old courthouse (1854), a castle-like conceit replete with an imposing stone-walled prison yard (1877), and added a modest new wing, the 2006 mandate for a new 50,000 square foot, $18 million expansion required the firm to win an invited design competition.

As design principal, Sapounzi expresses a strong fondness for Canada’s earlier “heroic” interpretation of the International Style in which a toned-down emotional balance plays to a quintessential Canadian sensibility, a sort of quiet dignity. As a centre of civic life, however, a city hall must include very tangible connections to a community’s scale and history as well as the materials that help define a region’s unique sense of place. He cites a deep respect for the work of Ron Thom, arguably Canada’s greatest mid-20th century architect. In terms of its site, the new addition is located east of and behind the old adapted courthouse which presents its entrance façade to Victoria Park. Two sides are bound by modestly scaled historic residences, but to the south across the street a large parking lot isolates the new wing from Milton’s urban business core.

“Our concept was to strengthen city hall’s role as Milton’s civic heart with a modern addition that would respect the architectural heritage of the site through its forms, materials and a respect for the scale found in the local context,” says Sapounzi.

With the Courthouse’s formal entry opening onto a large park, Sapounzi took the opportunity to create a new, three-part entrance piazza that may eventually tie the civic complex more directly into Milton’s downtown. The focus of the composition is an imposing but very transparent double-height extruded from the midpoint of the contemporary addition’s west side. On the atrium’s west side, it links to the earlier 1984 wing as well as the original heritage building, creating an open but sheltered forecourt, flanked on two sides by the stone wall of the old jail yard (now enclosing a garden) and the wall of the new block, also clad in the roughly-textured local limestone that forms the nearby Escarpment and Halton Hills.

This civic plaza faces toward the city core and leads to the atrium’s public entrance, framed by a monumental arch, a higher order of the smaller arched openings of the historical neighbour. The arch is surfaced in Prodema’s Prodex panels, a maple wood composite material. Outside materials flow into the atrium – limestone, rich maple paneling, raw exposed steel I-beams and clear glass panels and balustrades are awash with www.building.ca

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natural light so that surfaces have imposing depth and texture.

So transparent is the atrium with its abundant structural glazing, the third civic space, a square on its other side leading out and into the residential community, is visible from the front plaza.

In addition to the local limestone, says Sapounzi, the design drew on two other themes. First, a water feature moves along the plaza next to the new limestone wall giving presence to nearby 16 Mile Creek, while second, the landscape surrounding the new wing has been patterned based on aerial photographs of the region’s farmland. These symbolic fields are planted with local and seasonally varied species. While the plaza and atrium are intended as civic typologies of tower and town square, the new building has been well setback from the residential streets and the proportions of its openings, micro-scaled to reflect the character of the residential neighbourhood. At the same time, the amount of light drawn into the LEED Silver designed building has produced comfortable work spaces well-liked by their occupants.

Vaughan: Refining the Civic Presence

Although Vaughan’s impressive new civic centre technically opened in 2011, it reflects KPMB Architects’ design competition winner dating back to 2004. Therefore, its elegant L-shaped assemblage of almost minimalist, low-scaled and interconnected blocks totalling 280,000 square feet, marked by a slim 44.8 metre clock tower, came only four years after the opening of Bruce Kuwabara’s Richmond City Hall. His three city halls, he explains in a telephone interview, had different objectives.

What he calls Waterloo’s “mannered” approach was designed to establish “a whole new set of modern architecture [composed] to create enduring urban public spaces” while Richmond is a more casual anchor that provides an interactive and locally referenced focal point for a rapidly changing but still suburban community.

It was also the firm’s first concerted effort with green design.

Vaughan’s LEED Gold certified City Hall, says Kuwabara, is more “refined,” a study of complex simplicity in which the complex is represented by an artful layering of strongly rectilinear and elongated horizontal forms, save for the counterpoint of the clock tower. Volume heights are trimmed to two or three stories as they approach the residential neighbourhoods that border the site. The language, however, appears at first sight to be very simple. Dominant planes of transparent state-of-the-art glass curtain wall countered by very solid but rich terracotta planes (sourced from a family firm in nearby Buffalo, New York) seem to reference post-war Canadian modernism, if not even original Bauhaus aesthetics.

At closer inspection, a film of delicate sun screens provides additional depth and texture as well as serving the functional role of reducing solar gain.

Like Edmonton, Hamilton and Ottawa, the council chamber is prominently extruded and, like the last two, raised on columns. As in Hamilton, the chamber volume is completely transparent but with a sly twist. The “concert halllike” chamber is placed inside an interior saucer as if Toronto’s www.building.ca

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Canada’s most energy efficient city and town halls Toronto and Region Conservation (TRCA) has revealed the top 15 most energy efficient town/city halls in Canada. A result of the Town Hall Challenge, an offshoot of the Mayors’ Megawatt Challenge and managed since 2003 by TRCA, the challenge calls on municipalities across Canada to submit their town halls’ utility data. 60 municipal buildings participated, with the top 25 per cent being identified and each participating municipality receiving a report on how their town hall ranked, its energy intensity per square foot and how much could be saved if it met a target of 20 ekWh per square foot.

“City and town halls are at the heart of every municipality, and should be their flagships of sustainability,” said Brian Dundas, coordinator of the Mayors’ Megawatt Challenge Program for TRCA. “A growing number of municipalities are leading the effort to lower energy use and cut emissions, however there’s still work to be done with several using as much as three times more energy per square foot than other comparable facilities. If all buildings using over 20 ekWh per square foot were to achieve the target of 20, they would each save on average $118,000 per year in utility costs and associated GHG emissions.”

The 2010 Top 15 Town/City Halls: 1. City Hall, Town of Ladysmith, B.C. 11.5 ekWh/sq.ft.

2. Town Hall, Town of Rothesay, NB 14.1 ekWh/sq. ft.

3. Civic Complex, City of Pickering, ON 15.0 ekWh.sq.ft.

4. City Hall Annex-Vancity, City of Vancouver, B.C. 17.2 ekWh.sq.ft.

5. City Hall, City of Fredericton, NB 17.3 ekWh.sq.ft.

6. City Hall, City of Castlegar, B.C. 18.0 ekWh.sq.ft.

7. City Hall, City of Hamilton, ON 19.9 ekWh.sq.ft.

8. Niagara Region Headquarters, Niagara Region, ON 20.9 ekWh.sq.ft.

9. Metro Hall, City of Toronto, ON 21.2 ekWh.sq.ft.

10. City Hall, City of St. Catharines, ON 21.3 ekWh.sq.ft.

11. City Hall, City of Richmond, B.C. 22.5 ekWh.sq.ft.

12. City Hall, City of Dieppe, NB 23.3 ekWh.sq.ft.

13. Municipal Hall, Resort Municipality of Whistler, B.C. 24.0 ekWh.sq.ft.

14. Civic Centre, City of Mississauga, ON 24.2 ekWh.sq.ft.

15. Administrative Centre, York Region, ON 24.9 ekWh.sq.ft.

The top 15 had an average building energy use of 19.7 ekWh per square foot, about half had energy management plans, and most do not have established energy targets, though some are incorporating them into plans, particularly those with FCM’s Partners for Climate Protection. Most have green teams or committees to help with occupant awareness and better behaviour practices, and many work with their local hydro utility companies.

The report also shows that the size of the municipality wasn’t important: some of the largest and smallest municipalities have buildings in the top. When it comes to energy efficiency of a building, its age has little impact on its performance. Of the top 15, only four buildings were built in this century while five were built before the 1970s.

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Cover story: Town Halls

Top: Each wing of the new Vaughan Civic Centre features a central atrium to draw daylight into the building, and connecting stairs to reduce elevator use (Photo by Maris Mezulis). Above: The dramatic 10-storey clock tower will act as a solar chimney, drawing in fresh air into the structure to reduce reliance on its mechanical systems (Photo by Tom Arban).

iconic council hall has been captured inside Hamilton’s transparent box. (Of note: Hamilton is Kuwabara’s home town and his father worked on the original terrazzo floors; Kuwabara even worked for Roscoe in his early days.) Finally, similar to Ottawa, recessed glass on the first levels of the Vaughan complex make weightier volumes seem almost to float.

Inside, the volumes are organized around one of four atriums that along with the clock tower act as heat chimneys in the summer while also drawing natural light deep into the public and working spaces. Windows in both these spaces and on perimeter walls can be manually opened under certain 24 BUILDING February/March 2012

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conditions to maximize fresh air and provide some individual control. The atriums also act as important gathering spots for both employees and the public. The abundant use of glazing found on the exterior has been liberally used inside, ensuring the interior is open and very transparent. At the same time, white oak paneling, granite and Wiarton limestone, as well as glass, reflective architectural concrete and flared concrete columns ensures warmth and richness play off cool sleekness, all within a robust visible structure.

While the city hall is an accomplished achievement in its own right, success of Kuwabara’s civic vision will depend on the frequently fickle whim of city politicians.

Vaughan, he states, is the “ultimate suburb” having morphed from a mere 30,000 souls 30 years ago to approaching a quarter of a million yet without producing an urban core. In 2003, when the council selected a site for the new civic complex, it rejected the most promising future urban option represented by the planned Vaughan Corporate Centre for the location of the existing city hall. Sorensen, Gravely, Lowes’ site selection report recommended the site only if council “does not need [city hall] to be in a prominent or visible location and is satisfied with a minor mixed-use setting of local significance.”

Surrounded by new and older residential neighbourhoods, a park, railway tracks and a mixed-use entrance side along Keele St. of strip malls and ersatz low-rise condo buildings, the 27 acre triangle site has limited urban potential.

In response, KPMB proposed a “civic landscape…whose order of buildings [was] inspired by the clarity of Ontario town planning where City Hall, Civic Square, Market and Cenotaph define an identifiable civic precinct.” To do so, the firm broke the competition rules, says Kuwabara, proposing a grouping of discrete buildings with mostly underground parking instead of the proposed single structure and 900 surface spots. Along with the U-shaped configuration of the city hall and its attached wing that embrace a tight civic plaza at the site’s broad west end, the winning plan includes standalone library and office buildings flanking a broad esplanade.

The last incorporates a reflecting pool/skating rink and public gardens with a partially submerged garden pavilion facing the eastern site entrance. “To acknowledge the city’s agricultural heritage,” the architects write, this civic “campus is laid out according to a series of east-west bands that reference the linear pattern of land cultivation that once characterized the region.”

Success as a fully functioning public focus in the absence of a supporting urban fabric will depend on the political will to realize Kuwabara’s elegant and integrated vision.

The best architecture today is Modern in the sense that it seeks to reflect the age in which it is built. But there is a healthy eclectic regionalism to this Modernism that avoids falling into the sophomoric and narrow “zeitgeist” rhetoric of so much of mid-20th century work. This does not negate, however, the validity of well crafted, very refined design work that combines local awareness with attachment to simplicity of form and expression. www.building.ca

12-03-21 9:44 AM

Inside the Past

To commemorate the War of 1812 bicentennial, Reich+Petch Architects helped the St. Lawrence Parks Commission and others enhance the on-site immersive experiences of their historic monuments and forts.

W

orking on a museum experience at a historical site means working with what is there, even if the landscape has changed significantly. Features of the land or buildings may not be as they were for the period examined, or even exist anymore. And when the period of history being examined is the War of 1812 in Ontario, the relative lack of prominence can be a challenge.

Yet the obscurity also offers opportunities for designers to have a blank slate in the visitor’s mind to tell a story.

To commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812, Toronto-based Reich + Petch Architects were selected to design exhibits at Fort Malden in Amherstberg, Fort George in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Old Fort Erie, Fort York in Toronto, and Upper Canada Village in Morrisburg as part of site refurbishments sponsored by the governments of Ontario and Canada. Reich + Petch also designed the new visitors’ centre at Upper Canada Village, exhibits at Fort Henry’s new visitors’ centre in Kingston, and exhibits at the Laura Secord homestead in Queenston Heights.

Fort Malden

In the early stages of the war, Fort Malden was a key site with a shipyard from which the British and their First Nations allies attacked Detroit, but little of the original fort remains today.

The story of the fort is in many ways the story of Amherstberg, as the site of the fort changed purposes – from military to a mental institution to a mill to a residential zone – to meet the town’s needs over time.

“We worked with Parks Canada’s site manager, interpretation manager, curator and collections person to think through the stories they wanted to tell, tracing from the War of 1812 up to the present day, and talk about the change seen in the town of Amherstberg,” says project co-ordinator and principal Pauline Dolovich. “Right now when you’re in Amherstburg most of it looks like a city park because most of the buildings from the fort are not there.” www.building.ca

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By Tyler Davie

The exhibits Reich + Petch developed are located in the site’s interpretive centre in a laundry building of the former mental institution and opened last summer. Each room measures between 250 and 300 square feet and feels like a gallery, says principal Whit Petch. On the ground level is the story of the war, centred around the rock on which Shawnee chief Tecumseh gave a speech rallying First Nations to fight with the British against the Americans, with an audio track of the speech in English and Shawnee. As visitors walk through the building, they walk through the history of the town, ending with a view of what it is today through windows closed since the 1970s.

The thorough collection of artifacts from the era of the war down to the present day gave Reich + Petch plenty of firearms, uniforms, and written correspondence with which to tell a story. “Malden is lucky because it’s one of the sites that have had a collections person throughout its history,” says Dolovich.

“They actually had a good collection, well catalogued, and each object is understood, which is unique to a lot of sites.”

Sometimes curatorial expertise can be a challenge because the sheer number of artifacts they have could overwhelm a visitor if they were all displayed, says Petch. And with Malden, the physical space and budget forced Parks Canada and Reich + Petch to sharpen their focus. “We made some decisions early on about who was coming here and how they would use the building and that affected how we would lay out the rooms,” says Dolovich.

“We brought their children’s space down to the main level and emphasized it because it’s a core audience for them.”

In-house staff that could perform maintenance, such as installing new floors, and students researching the Parks Canada’s library and the Royal Ontario Museum’s archives for high-quality images needed for displays freed up more of the budget for exhibits, says Dolovich.

The challenge for the students was finding the right images to use at the required quality, Petch says, because the budget would not have covered original illustrations. The images and material used in exhibits at Fort Malden were strongly influenced by existing rooms and spaces.

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The War of 1812

at the fort and the war, including the role of First Nations.

The entrance to the building is situated at the original waterfront of the city. Visitors are greeted with a graphic of a 1,000-lb. shell gun and led into a lobby with a boat model, Douglas Coupland’s toy soldiers sculpture, and a model of a dredger used to shape the waterfront.

From there, visitors will see exhibits and the vault, an environmentally controlled Previous page and above: The new visitor centre in Upper Canada Village pays homage to traditional local barn structures with their cedar-shingle gable roofs by including wood siding and 25-ft. space where objects can be displayed vaulted exposed timber ceilings (Photos by Shai Gil Photography). that would have been damaged in the process before.

The last steps before entering the fort commons are taken Upper Canada Village up a 100-ft. ramp, designed by the building architects as an Reich + Petch were freed from this restriction at Upper Canada area for a multimedia experience. It is here where the six hours Village where they were architects and exhibit designers for of battle at Fort York will be illustrated. “From the start when the Discovery Centre in association with NORR Limited, the British sight the American ships arriving, there’s fighting which opened last year. “We did a master plan for the exhibits at the water’s edge, out to fighting in the forest, where there before we did the building so we had a good idea for what the was the big explosion where a lot of Americans were killed exhibits were going to be about and the spaces that would be when they blew up the grand magazine on the embankment,” required,” says Petch. says Dolovich.

The Discovery Centre features touch-screens and Re-enactments and other footage are also an important interactive videos that explain the battle at Crysler’s Farm component of the exhibits for Fort George, Old Fort Erie, and and how it affected the development of the surrounding area, Fort Henry. Fort George features a video cube that describes including the village preserved from the 1860s. The building events around the fort during the war, and opens this summer. acts as an entrance to the village and a small train ride that At Old Fort Erie, part of a recently-shot PBS documentary moves visitors around the battlefield (at least a recreation of it, will play at the visitor centre. The audience will then embark as the actual battlefield was submerged when the St. Lawrence on a tour back and forth through the siege wall that tells Seaway was built). the story of the fighting from the perspectives of the British Here Reich + Petch built houses and encampments, and even invaders and American occupiers in the bloodiest battles of built a display of firing cannons with the added sound effects of the war. the balls hitting the earth and water. “You can’t interpret the Reich + Petch’s work at Fort Henry is in the visitor centre, site as such but they’ve got a number of monuments on the set to open this spring and, like York and Old Fort Erie, edge of the river which we did interpretation for describing the introduces the postwar fort, which is almost completely intact. importance of the St. Lawrence River in the war,” says Petch.

The level of control in telling a story changes by how much He says Reich + Petch and interpretive planners Blue Sky, control the firm has in building design, and what material is who wrote the stories for all of the firm’s 1812 projects, took available already. The relative good condition of Fort Henry and more initiative in picking the artifacts for stories because St. Fort York allowed Reich + Petch the opportunity to introduce Lawrence Parks Commission had less curatorial resources visitors to inhabitable pieces of history, so the emphasis of than Parks Canada. This gave the firm more of an opportunity the work could be more directly focused on storytelling. Fort to shape the exhibits and consequently the building.

Malden’s collection provided ample material to choose from to describe the experience of living in Amherstberg through Fort York changing times.

The same opportunity did not exist at Fort York, where the At Upper Canada Village’s visitor centre and surrounding visitor centre’s architecture had already been decided by grounds, Reich + Petch were able to shape the physical the time Reich + Petch began designing exhibits for it. “It’s experience of the space itself, to clearly illustrate what went on. a complicated building, a building that’s doing a lot for the With the War of 1812’s relative lack of historic prominence, community,” says Dolovich, co-ordinator of the still-ineffective storytelling is even more important to engage visitors development project. “For the site, it’s a key piece of a strategy and meet the expectations of communities wanting to share that kind of works outside of the walls and within the walls.” the importance of what remains from that time to their lives Dolovich says the City of Toronto wanted to use the centre to today. show how Toronto and Canada are affected today by the fighting 26 BUILDING February/March 2012

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www.building.ca

12-03-21 9:45 AM

Fast, Cheap(er) and Out of In Control There were no ties, but lots of tablets and laptops and non-stop discussions about the cloud, infinite computing, mobile devices and collaboration at Autodesk University 2011 in Las Vegas.

By Peter Sobchak

I

t was like Disneyland for nerds. For a few days in early December, 8,000 design and engineering professionals from around the world who use Autodesk software descended upon The Venetian in Las Vegas for Autodesk University, now in its 19th year. This is where they receive training on the latest Autodesk 3D design software, free certification opportunities and interact with and learn from other users and design industry leaders.

It was here that Autodesk announced several new features to be added to the next release of AutoCAD WS, a free web and mobile application that enables users to view, edit and share AutoCAD projects across desktop, web and mobile devices. “We’re blurring the boundaries between devices and platforms so you can design regardless of using a laptop, tablet, smartphone,” said Carl Bass, president and Autodesk CEO. AutoCAD WS users will have access to 3D interactive features, including the ability to work with 3D drawings on mobile devices. In addition, AutoCAD WS will include GPS capabilities, allowing geographic location information to be shared and saved with design projects, as well as new Plot-to-Print capabilities for immediate remote printing to any HP ePrinter, including Designjets.

Although this event was completely focused on Autodesk and an array of third-party applications, overheard conversations among attendees confirmed they weren’t all drinking the same Kool-Aid, and knew not all the answers came from San Rafael, CA. “There isn’t one software tool that works for everything. Having the Suites allows us to pick the one that we need for a particular job,” said Philip Ra, senior designer at www.building.ca

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Yazdani Studio of Cannon Design. “Design software is acting like a Rosetta Stone between different disciplines,” said Mark Foster Gage, principal and architect at Gage/Clemenceau.

The Promise of the Cloud

For the number of times the word “cloud” was bandied about, you’d think this was a meteorologists’ convention. But at AU 2011, they weren’t talking about a visible mass of liquid droplets. Instead, they were discussing what James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research called “a standardized technology capability delivered in a pay-per-use, self-service way.” Think of it as a centralized, remote archive. “You never own the cloud. You always rent from the cloud,” says Staten, and for firms seeking more storage space cloud computing can be a low-cost alternative that although risky, may be surprisingly safer than local storage.

Leaders of A/E/P and environmental firms list storage of documents that hold sensitive company and customer information as one of their top concerns. “I keep dreaming that more stuff can go into a cloud based solution, thus freeing us up,” said Ken Young, senior vice president and CIO at HOK during an innovation forum at AU 2011. “I’m really excited about the democratization of the IT infrastructure.” And of course with new cloud-based products like 360 for PLM and

Left and above: AutoCAD WS screenshots from mobile devices such as the iPhone and Samsung GalaxyTab. February/March 2012 BUILDING 27

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Autodesk University

…it ain’t a conference without third party vendors.

Bluebeam Software

PDF Revu CAD improves communication and collaboration on projects by enabling digital processes from design through bid and build. Plugins for AutoCAD and Revit also allow for easy one-button PDF creation and batch options. www.bluebeam.com

Nexus, Autodesk’s endorsement of the cloud is obvious. “Instead of a ‘Big Ass’ brain we have a ‘Big Mass’ brain with the use of the Cloud and the Crowd of infinite computing,” said Jeff Kowalski, Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk.

“There are always risks with putting anything online because you are transferring data through the Internet infrastructure, and once it’s there it is exposed to more people and more computing processes that are not under your direct control,” says Duane Craig, publisher of Construction Cloud Computing. “Still, it is not inherently more risky than say your own poorly guarded in-house storage system that everyone in your organization accesses every day using a wide range of devices, many of which are accessing the files from the Internet.”

“Designers have a lot of things to think about. It’s gotta be fast, it’s gotta be cheap, and you’ve got to be able to trust the data,” said Dr. Patrick Coulter, COO of Granta Design Limited. “The cloud enables us to provide more information and a better service that’s easier to use,” If you’re thinking about moving in the direction of the cloud, “Ask for some plain language that details just what they guarantee and what they don’t guarantee. Find out how they store the data, what types of backups are included and how they qualify the employees who will be working in the data center where your data will be stored. Ask them to describe what your responsibilities are as well,” says Craig.

Bring on BIM!

Vizerra

SmartBIM collaborated with Vizerra to create VIMtrek, which converts a 250 MB Autodesk Revit design file into an immersive collaborative 3D environment in under five minutes. The platform is structured on gaming industry standards (think The Sims), maximizing compression technology so files end up at one-third of the original Revit file size, and are a fully navigable walkthrough environment, in which the viewer can roll the cursor over objects to see all the embedded BIM, environmental and energy efficiency data, such as ecoScorecard. www.smartbim.com

Context

Contex launched their brand new HD Ultra wide format scanner at the show. Boasting six-inch per second scanning speeds, and an unprecedented 901 monochrome and 597 colour scans per hour, the scanner is EnergyStar compliant, available in 36- and 42-inches, easily combines with most large format printers and is also available as an MFP. www.contex.com

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Not surprisingly, with Autodesk showcasing Autodesk 360 for BIM – “a powerful and comprehensive set of cloud-based and on-premise tools that can have project teams up and running with collaboration and data management in a matter of days” – the pros and cons of BIM workflow from design through to construction dominated many discussions.

“The connectedness and convergence of BIM is happening and is part of a larger cultural issue. It’s a process for getting things done,” said Dennis Sheldon, Chief Technology Officer at Gehry Technologies. “One crane lift in a construction project in NYC could cost $2,500 just for that one lift – so it needs to be organized; panels need to be in the right location. [BIM can] break down that abstraction between representation and the actual construction.”

“To us, the cloud, apps and the whole Revit BIM environment is a game changer,” said David Cooper, North American CEO of WSP Group. “One of the truths of BIM is that it’s greener, but it also helps us provide different and innovative solutions to our clients.”

All the tech babble aside, AU 2011 was certainly an idearich landscape featuring a lot of people doing a lot of truly innovative things. And Autodesk wants you to know that they’re here to help. “The past decade was about finding new social and innovation models on the web. The next decade will be about applying them to the real world,” said Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired at the keynote address. www.building.ca

12-03-21 9:46 AM

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VIEWPOINT

Still setting lofty goals after 67 years in business.

By Sheri Craig

H

arold Shipp says he tries to reach for new heights every day. He then mentions, oh so casually, that on January 21 he went sky diving for the second time to commemorate his 86th birthday.

The chairman of Mississauga, Ont.-based Shipp Corporation has always set high personal goals.

The development company he helped grow was started by his father, Gordon S. Shipp, as a small home building firm in 1923.

Shipp joined in 1945 at 19, straight out of high school, building and selling three houses on his own to earn a profit of $1,500.

The following year he became a full partner in G.S. Shipp & Son. It’s a different business today, Shipp says. He views as ironic that what he could accomplish in months in 1950 can now take years to achieve.

In January, 1950, he bought land on the south side of the Queen Elizabeth Way, then a four-lane undivided road leading to Toronto, and built 2,000 homes in a former apple orchard that became the Mississauga neighbourhood of Applewood Acres. “We had the land zoned and plans approved and then if you went in before noon, you could pick up your building permits the same day.

Harold Shipp The first homes were built and opened five months later on Mother’s Day,” he recalls.

Now, any developer buying raw land in most municipalities can expect to carry that land from six months to a couple of years. “It can take a month or more to process a building permit for each house,” Shipp says. ‘The bureaucracy has grown bigger and the process has slowed down to add to the costs.”

Shipp remembers that the first houses he built were of brick and then by 1959 of brick veneer with increased insulation.

Today houses are built with the emphasis on green technology, and home owners have been getting a far better house over the years, he adds. And there is the home building warranty ensuring that the developer stands behind his houses.

“But our company always stood behind our houses. We were always proud of what we built. About 1958, we started putting a glazed brick about knee level just outside the front door. The brick reads ‘Shipp-built,’” he says, adding that it is always satisfying to meet people who tell him they were raised in a Shipp-built house. “A suit has a label. A car has a name.

Why shouldn’t builders put their name on their products?”

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Shipp Corporation’s home base continues to be Mississauga. Shipp developed the Applewood Village Shopping Centre in 1954 and Applewood Place in 1973, a 26-storey, 400-suite rental building, the largest high-rise apartment building in Mississauga at that time. In 1980, the first office building of the four-building, 1.2-million-square-foot Mississauga Executive Centre was opened. One year later, the first two buildings of the Shipp Centre, now the Clarica Centre, were opened at Islington Avenue and Bloor Street, in Toronto. The third building, which opened in 1991, completed the complex, also 1.2 million square feet, connecting it to the Toronto subway system.

“A suit has a label.

A car has a name.

Why shouldn’t builders put their name on their products?”

At the same time, 1979 to 1981, Shipp was developing Shipp’s Landing, on the southern tip of Marco Island, south of Naples, off Florida’s west coast. The residential enclave includes a seven-storey building, a 21-storey building and 44 garden suites, with attached boat docks.

There is also Shipp Place, a 69-condominium townhouse community, near the Square One shopping mall in downtown Mississauga. More recently, Shipp developed land acquired in Milton, Ont., in 1972, as Main Street Village, a 2,600-site home complex.

Shipp is justifiably proud that he followed his father as chairman of the Toronto Home Builders Association and the Canadian Home Builders’ Association. They were also both elected to the Canadian Home Builders’ Hall of Fame and his father is the only Canadian developer in the U.S. National Association of Home Builders’ Hall of Fame.

Shipp was honoured in 2009 with the first Lifetime Business Achievement Award by the Mississauga Board of Trade. It recognized his and his company’s achievements as the longest active builder and developer in Mississauga. It also recognized his role with many community groups and non-profit organizations.

“Put more in than you take out and that’s what makes this a better place to live,” he said at the time, adding “Personally, we like to always hoist our mast as high as we can reach.” www.building.ca

12-03-21 9:46 AM

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