For 506 years, 369 of them outdoors, Michelangelo’s David has endured as a masterpiece carved from soft Italian stone.
First Canadian Place, just 35, hasn’t aged quite as gracefully. Canada’s tallest corporate tower might boast some of the best bones on Bay Street, but the 72-storey building – clad in the same Carrara marble that produced David – has a serious skin problem.
Thus begins one of the most extensive high-rise makeovers the country has seen: a $100-million-plus project that includes exfoliation of all 4,000 tonnes of the tower’s marble, and its replacement with sleek, white-patterned panels of multilayered glass.
The goal of owner Brookfield Properties, which took The Globe and Mail on an exclusive tour this week, is to deliver a brighter, lighter and greener building with minimal disruption to tenants, the largest of which is Bank of Montreal, whose head offices occupy 30 floors.
With 45,000 slabs of greying, warped marble to remove and 5,986 glass panels to install over the next 18 months, that’s a tall order, but one the owners and their contractors appear ready to fill.
New heating and cooling systems and an overhaul of interior common areas are also part of Brookfield’s push towards coveted LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certification at the tower. But the recladding, and its promise to restore lost sparkle to the city’s skyline, will make the biggest impact.
“It’s an enormous undertaking,” said Jim White, Brookfield’s vice-president of construction for North America. “It has taken tremendous effort just to get to this stage of the program, along with a lot of team work, custom construction and engineering.”
Up close, it’s alarmingly clear why the marble – distorted and discoloured by three and a half decades of freeze-thaw cycles in the harsh Canadian climate – was not a good choice, despite the pride Toronto’s Reichmann family took in their once-bright building in 1975.
As the tallest skyscraper in the Commonwealth at the time, First Canadian Place helped push the Reichmanns’ Olympia & York Developments Ltd. onto the global stage, where their fortunes soared to the stratosphere before crashing back to Earth under the weight of London’s Canary Wharf project in the early 1990s. The marble – favoured by the Reichmanns and their consulting designer, Edward Durell Stone, but discouraged by their Toronto architects at Bregman + Hamann – eventually took the same plunge.
Countless of the 90-kilogram pieces warped and were replaced over the years, but others – like one that crash-landed on the building’s three-storey podium in 2007 – worked themselves loose without detection. Another marble-clad Durell design, Chicago’s Amoco (now Aon) building, suffered a similar fate and was recovered in granite.
Marble is “just a dumb material to use,” said Douglas Birkenshaw, a B+H architect who, as a teenager, watched First Canadian Place rise, and worked on the overhaul design. In a cold, damp climate, “it absorbs water,” he said, “it starts curving and develops memory,” as though it were a flooded wood floor.
Meanwhile, the erection of more towers in Toronto’s financial district caused an increase in wind velocity and air-pressure changes around the building, which further loosened the slabs, Mr. Birkenshaw said.
When Brookfield acquired the building in 2005 in a $2-billion play for several Olympia & York properties, “we knew something had to be done,” said Melissa Coley, one of the company’s vice-presidents. Repair and replacement of the marble was considered but dismissed in favour of the glass panels, which consist of three glass sheets, each roughly two centimetres thick, laminated together. The top sheet is clear, but two of the subsurface layers have been treated with a ceramic white coating – one solid, the other in a triangle pattern – to create visual depth.
