Hullmark Centre, a significant, mixed-use development at the corner of Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue in North York, broke ground in December, 2010. There is a lot of intensification going on around that corner, and we are working on a few of these projects, but Hullmark, with its generous, outward-looking design that welcomes the corner with a public plaza, will certainly be its anchor.

Hullmark Centre

The city of North York is working hard to create as much diversity as possible in recent developments. This means that mixed use is very important – it can help to create communities, encouraging live/work lifestyles with shopping, workout areas and cultural centres all within walking distance. It makes for a richer neighbourhood. But having all of those elements together challenges more common two-dimensional thinking when it comes to city services like below grade water, sewage and storm systems.

North West View from Below

A project like Hullmark is extremely complicated on many levels, particularly in terms of relocating services in order to allow for the building on the site. For example, we did a storm line relocation. But because we wanted to add a TTC connection from the station to the building by way of a below-grade bridge (essentially a pedestrian tunnel), we needed to relocate a number of services including Bell telecommunications lines, hydro ducts and more, while building around all of this. And without ever disrupting services. You can see the complexity of the work involved in the axonometric images above and below.

North West View from Below

On such large-scale projects, part of our role is to expand beyond the architecture into a larger role of facilitator in order to explain to various parties, including our client, Tridel, the use of services, building structure and how to go about constructing the building. We do this through our use of software like Revit and BIM (which industry analyst Jerry Laiserin describes as “a digital representation of the building process to facilitate exchange and impenetrability of information in digital format.”

In short, on a large scale, mixed-use development like Hullmark, we not only need to design the building and site plan, we must also answer to many interests. At Hullmark, the project is divided into five different owners (the 2 condo towers, the offices and corporate centre, the retail and the commercial parking) and we must also act as the placeholder for a lot of information from different parties – Bell, Hydro, the TTC among them – and try to bridge the differences and have all parties understand the others, as well as the bigger picture.

North West View from Above

It gives you an idea of what goes on, in terms of infrastructure challenges, behind the architectural design of many of the mixed use projects being built around Toronto.

I’ll follow up with a more in-depth post about the long, complex (but necessary) process through which we negotiated with the TTC to get that below grade bridge approved.

Carlos