The design for a new, unusually built tower for big creative industries coming to Vancouver is a series of cantilevered boxes coming out from a circular core and cascading gardens coming down from each floor.
One of the city's prominent developers is betting big on creative industries coming to Vancouver by building an unusually designed tower just for those new companies.
Ian Gillespie said he's put extra effort into the design of the building, in a prominent spot on Georgia Street next to the city's central library, to improve the quality of life for people inside and to add something creative to the fabric of the city on the exterior.
It will be a kind of snowflake design, a series of cantilevered boxes coming out from a circular core and cascading gardens coming down from each floor. It has been designed by two Japanese architects in Westbank's design group, working with the local firm Merrick Architecture.
"People too often think of work spaces as just vertical warehousing," said Mr. Gillespie, whose company also built the new Telus head office on the next block.
"And it always bothers me that an office building, when it's not in use, what is it doing, what does it add to the fabric of the city? We've come up with a building that is a sculptural element."
Mr. Gillespie said there are several companies interested in becoming potential tenants.
He said that he believes the creative sector, which has taken up two-thirds of the office space in downtown Vancouver the past two years, is going to continue booming.
Mr. Gillespie is also building work spaces in Seattle, where the creative and tech industry is growing even faster than in Vancouver.
The people in that sector don't want typical office spaces and they will pay for good design.
"We see a demand coming in 2020 that other people won't be able to meet," he said.
Mr. Gillespie's new tower is the latest in what has been a steady series of waves of office building, the last since about 2011.
Some predicted in 2013 that, with four new towers in the works and a million square feet coming on the market, the boom would end.
But it has continued along, with new office towers still under construction and being proposed at a steady pace, and is so strong that Mr. Gillespie said he is building his 24-storey building on spec, with no committed tenants.
There have been rumours that Amazon, expanding rapidly in Vancouver, would be a tenant, but Mr. Gillespie said he isn't tied to any company just yet.
Amazon representative Kaan Yalkin said the company currently has 700 full-time employees with 300 more open positions, but he didn't have a comment on whether it was looking for new space beyond the considerable amount it leased in the Telus head-office tower four years ago.
Besides building attractive working space, Mr. Gillespie said he sees his new office tower as part of his continuing effort to transform Georgia Street into the grand ceremonial street for the city that it should be.
Over the years, his company has built the Residences on Georgia at the south end, the Shangri-La hotel and apartments near the central business district and the Telus head office at Georgia and Seymour.
He also has a luxury condo tower proposed for a site close to the north end of Georgia, designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma.
Mr. Gillespie said he hopes his building will help provide a better frame and contrast for Vancouver's central public library building, designed by Moshe Safdie and said to be an echo of the Flavian amphitheatre in Rome.
According to the Colliers commercial brokerage's most recent report, Vancouver had about 23.8 million square feet of office space as of the end of March, 2017, with a 7.3-per-cent vacancy rate.
It has seen a significant amount of space leased to non-traditional new industries. A company called WeWork, which provides shared work spaces, recently leased five floors of the Bentall III office tower. Rates are ranging from $22 to $32 a square foot.
Frances Bula