One Wall Centre

Sheraton Wall Centre

The Sheraton Wall Centre is the tallest building in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada as of 2005. The building is located at a high point on the downtown peninsula of Vancouver and is addressed as 1088 Burrard Street. The building was designed by Busby and Associates Architects and construction was completed in 2001. The Sheraton Wall Centre won the 2001 Emporis Skyscraper Award for the best new skyscraper of 2001.

The Sheraton Wall Centre is the 2nd largest hotel in Western Canada with 765 rooms, 5 fewer rooms than The Fairmont Banff Springs.

Background

It is 48 stories high with a total height of 150 m. The first 30 floors of the building are a Sheraton Hotel and the remaining 17 floors are private residential condominiums. It is part of the Wall Centre complex owned by Wall Financial Corporation and was largely the vision of Peter Wall.

Construction

To counteract possible harmonic swaying during high winds, it has a tuned water damping system at the top level of the building which consists of two specially designed 190,000 L water tanks. These tanks are designed so that the harmonic frequency of the sloshing of the water in the tanks counteracts the harmonic frequency of the swaying of the building.

The building exterior has a two-tone appearance. The glass on the lower levels is a dark glass, while the glass on the upper levels is light coloured glass. To satisfy the public and the City of Vancouver Planning Department, who were concerned that this building would dominate the skyline, when this building was in the planning stages it was agreed that it would have a very "light" appearance that would blend in with a blue sky. After the design was approved, a minor amendment was requested to change it to a significantly darker glass. This was approved by a low level staff member in the planning department who apparently did not realize the significance of this change. When the glass started to be put on the building the public and the city planners noted that this did not meet design that was reviewed by the public and the city planning department. After many accusations back and forth as to how significant this change was and whether it required public review, the City agreed to compromise and allowed the lower glazing that was already installed to be the dark glazing, but required that the glazing on the upper levels be the light glazing that was originally proposed.

Rumour has it that hotel owner Peter Wall threatened to call off the construction if the city forced him to replace all of the dark-paned glass, so a settlement was reached where only the remaining portion of the building (1/3 of its height) was faced with the typical "Yaletown green" lighter-coloured glass now common in the city's newer areas.

The Sheraton Wall Centre required a 23 m deep excavation — the deepest excavation to date for a building in Vancouver.

According to the June 2004 edition of Elevator World, Richmond Elevator won a contract to supply the building's elevators, marking the local elevator firm's first entry into traction elevators (Richmond Elevator manufactures many of Vancouver's Hydraulic elevators). The installation features 10 elevators, 8 of which are high speed geared machines. The hotel is served by four 3000lb traction elevators at 800fpm, with a group of 3 for public usage and a single private VIP access elevator. There are also two hotel service elevators with 4000lb capacity each at 700fpm. The apartments are served by 2 elevators each with a capacity of 3500lb at 1000fpm. There are also 2 roped hydraulic elevators: the 3000lb to serve the parking garage, and the 5000lb to serve the banquet floors. There are 6 escalators installed by Fujitec.

Trivia

• This building was featured in the movie X-Men: The Last Stand as one of the buildings they used to give the cure to the mutants.

Gallery

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See also

• List of Vancouver's 10 tallest buildings

External links

• One Wall Centre project page at the Glotman•Simpson Group
• One Wall Centre on Emporis
• Emporis 2001 Award

49.2805°N 123.12564°W / 49.2805; -123.12564