Westbank Projects Corp. has applied to the City of Vancouver to rezone 601-627 Main Street from Historic Area (HA-1A) District to Comprehensive Development (CD-1) District. The proposal is for a 17-storey mixed-use commercial and residential development with an underground parking garage. The proposed development is comprised of 9,225.9 square feet (875.1 square metres) of ground floor retail, 16 floors of residential with 26 units of senior housing and 145 units of market housing, and 1,828.9 square feet (169.9 square metres) of amenity space. The proposal will include 76 parking stalls, two loading spaces (Class B), and 215 bicycle stalls. The proposed floor space ratio (FSR) is 7.88 and height is 150 feet (45.7 metres).
Tower looks very typical - i.e. infill - whihc isn't all that bad.
The main issue I see is the podium facade facing Main st. It need more articulation - i.e. vary it so it looks like a number of side-by-side Chinatown buildings with the deep balconies.
Last edited by officedweller; Oct 17, 2011 at 6:56 PM.
The development sounds nice if it was placed anywhere else... but I don't feel too good about that lack of office or retail space to replace what is lost... and in fact I'm rather skeptical if we can keep Chinatown as a whole.
I really like the size of the podium, a 7 storey streetwall will look great in that block. Agreed with OD that a little variety on the podium would be nice, but definitely not a deal breaker imo.
Don't know where you guys plan on putting the extra retail, almost the entire street level is devoted to retail from what I can see on the floorplan.
I don't think any additional retail is needed, the ground floor for retail is plenty, there currently a glut of retail space in Chinatown with no need to flood the market with more empty spaces. A partial floor of officespace on the 2nd would be optimal in my opinion but isn't in the cards.
Definitely an interesting building, floorplan-wise. I think a lot of the units work, even with some pretty small sizes. The studios in the 350 sf range though, yikes. I understand people in other countries/cultures (asia) live in much smaller spaces than we do here, but I personally don't see that being healthy. Something in the 400s is about all I could be comfortable with. Very nice use of outdoor amenity space though, I am glad to see a lot more of that. As for the exterior, hopefully it is just lousy computer renderings, but I think it looks terrible.
I agree that this is an improvement and I am intrigued by the pattern/images on the wall. Spaces like that have such potential to add to the streetscape, instead of simply acting as a blank painted concrete shearwall.