Only five buildings taller than 150m have ever been voluntarily demolished. For tall buildings in an urban setting, studies show that it will cost more and take longer to take it down than it did to put it up. This means that for iconic high-rise buildings, demolition is not an acceptable or practical option given their scale and significance. Facade or component renewal to maintain durable enclosure is necessary to extend the useful life of those towers.
Hamid Vossoughi, our facade expert from Canada, will be presenting on the retrofit of three tall iconic towers in downtown Toronto, Canada with various degrees of renewal, ranging from spandrel/vision re-glazing to coating finish renewal, coupled with internal system retro-commissioning and complete over-cladding of the exterior envelope.
- See Hamid: Monday, March 12, 2018, 10:30 - Session 2, Track Heritage + Facades, Stauffer Hall 102: Challenges of Tall Iconic Building Retrofit: Skin, Bones & Internal Systems
Hamid will present key business drivers for retrofit that ranged from risk management of an aged facade to image renewal to compete with newly built towers in a competitive market. He will also discuss challenges the project team faced, which included the required upfront due diligence and the unforeseen conditions; design limitations regarding the character-defining facade elements; managing the existing de-construction and re-construction of an occupied building; project scale; and finally, public safety as it relates to execution of work in a confined downtown area. In addition, Hamid will explain the solutions that were implemented for the three Toronto towers.
