Famous Vancouver architect James K.M. Cheng has pretty much defined the Vancouver downtown skyline in his 45-year career. Among the city’s crowded peninsula of towers, Cheng figures he’s designed about 50 of them.It therefore made sense that the Order of Canada recipient would design North America’s...
The Stack, a new 37-storey tower in downtown Vancouver, is North America's first zero-carbon office building.Famous Vancouver architect James K.M. Cheng has pretty much defined the Vancouver downtown skyline in his 45-year career. Among the city’s crowded peninsula of towers, Cheng figures he’s designed about 50 of them.
But only now has the technology been available to make a zero-carbon office tower physically and financially feasible, he said. Those technologies include new triple-pane glazing and a rooftop photovoltaic solar panel that can produce the energy the building consumes, said Cheng, who worked with a team of energy experts to build what would also become the city’s tallest commercial tower.“The best description is a conductor takes the music and modifies it to suit the result he wants to achieve.
“Every time you rotate a box, you create a shoulder, and that becomes a patio or terrace for that floor, so all of a sudden every tenant can have a private patio for staff,” he said.The stacked box design also allowed him to play with different configurations of office space, so it could be tailored to the needs of the tenants.
He also noticed that at ground level the area had courtyards and passageways used by workers who sat outdoors in the summer. He mapped out all the surrounding areas and created a pocket park that would connect to the network of passages and plazas instead of standing on its own, which was the old way of designing an office building. He calls those buildings “grandpa’s office buildings.”Unlike grandpa’s office towers, the Stack spaces are bright and the windows open and offer natural ventilation.
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