No way! keep the shadow restrictions. Building a good quality city is much more important than a giant penis of a building.

Lets face it, Calgary is pretty damn cool most of the year, the saving grace is the fact that it's usually sunny. I was out yesterday and in the shade it was probably 10 degrees colder than in the sun, and when it's only 12 degrees outside, that can make the difference whether you go outside or not.

Either way, looking forward to a boom that should bring about some more density and better quality development.

Bingo. An office market can sit at 3 or 4% vacancy, but if there isn't a trend showing it dropping, don't expect any new office construction.

Should end up being wider than the first Centennial phases, but not too bad I don't think. Centennial I is 40 floors, but with ~800k of space, and it's floor plate is not very big.

I'm a fan of Centennial III. Not very tall, but a nice solid building, and a good fit for that location.

It reminds me of the new Royal Bank Global Headquarters down at the harbourfront, which is starting construction next month...

Also, it makes a difference on the relative size of the existing market. A 2 or 3% drop in the vacancy rate of say a city like Regina isn't a alot of space in terms of raw numbers. A 3% drop in Calgary represents another Million sq feet - essentially 50 storey building worth of space.

Some potential new office space could come online next to the new RBC Global Headquarters building to be built down by the lake.

31 Floors seems to be the going size for new office towers in Toronto. - Nobody wants to build 50 or 60 floor office towers anymore. Wonder why?????

^they may be cutting down on the height of office towers, but not residential towers from the looks of it - 2 more 70 storey res towers!. Toronto is overtaking Chicago in terms of skyline size and density if it hasn't already.

Coldrsx: Yep, another "Fat Boy"! (Regarding Centenial III)

Between 2009 and 2012, 1.85 million sq ft of office space was built in Quebec City, the same amount as in Montreal, even though the Quebec market is about 5 time smaller than Montreal's. Despite this surge in construction, Quebec's vacancy rate remains low, at 4,8%. Hence, it is estimated that during the next two years, 1.1 million sq ft of additional office space will be made available in Quebec City (investments worth about $370M).

source: Altus InSite

http://www.lesaffaires.com/archives/...ontreal/536798

That's cool, but the problem for building nuts like us is that none of that translated into any significant towers in either Quebec or Montreal!

According to CBRE as quoted by CBC, Calgary's vacancy rate is 7% currently and dropping fast. Crazy considering how much office space was build here in the last 10 years.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar.../calgary-.html

and that's all classes of space in the core. AA is something like 3%. Amazing.

Centenial III
 

Yeah this is the type of thing I hate to see. I don't mind the aesthetic of the design but this pudgy beast is going to eat up all that retable space and not provide any height thereby potentially delaying construction of a tall tower. :hell:

Great news regarding the office vacancy rates accross the country though.

Like Livingston Place, Centenial III is something you'd see in a large American cities' suburb. If the city is is so concerned about "shadowing", they should ban developement altogether in these areas. Too many short and wide buildings DT.

density > *

On the Vancouver forum all the current office proposals in Vancouver proper have been calculated at an addition of over 4 million square feet of office space to be added (and for the most part these are all very solid proposals, some already u/c and / or at the site prep stage.

Not bad for Vancouver (and there are a few other proposals where the footage is not yet known)

I don't know how many times this needs to be stated - the height of Centennial III has nothing to do with shadow restrictions. Right across the street to the east there as a 40 storey 540 ft building (Centennial I). Centennial III could also have easily been in the 40 storey range, but the developer chose not to build it. Not every building needs to max out their potential height.

The most important thing is the quality of design and contribution to the urban fabric - Centennial III is extremely solid in this regard. Besides it's not that "fat" a building - a floor plate of around 24,000 sq ft is not that large really - very average.

Agreed. It's not much bigger floorplate than Centenial II which is quite slender.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...rticle2220254/


Move over, Toronto – there’s a new hotspot in town
shelley white
Special to Globe and Mail Update
Published Monday, Oct. 31, 2011 4:54PM EDT
Last updated Monday, Oct. 31, 2011 7:43PM EDT


Sky-high rents. Heavy demand for downtown office space. A magnet for company headquarters. It may sound like Toronto, but this commercial real estate hotspot is decidedly farther west.

Despite erratic markets and a lingering world recession, Calgary's office and commercial real estate market rivals Toronto as the most robust in the country, driven predominantly by the continued growth plans of energy companies.

“We've got a vibrant downtown core, a strong commodity-based economy, low tax rates in Alberta and [many] corporate head offices in Calgary, most of those tied to the energy sector. Calgary is a dynamic place to be right now,” says Joe Binfet, managing director of Colliers International in Calgary.

Indeed, the Toronto Board of Trade's 2011 Scorecard on Prosperity, which compares 24 of the world's most prosperous urban centres, gave Calgary third place, just below Paris and San Francisco. Toronto came in eighth.

Dynamic, eh? :D

These articles are only news to the Toronto media. What's weird is I'd swear they were printing the exact same stories in 2007. Guess they assumed the recession hit everyone equally and that Calgary emptied out or something.