The UrbanToronto Forum has been buzzing about Cadillac Fairview's plans for a new 54-storey office tower at 156 Front Street West ever since new images broke last week. The developer hired Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture of Chicago to design the building, one of the world's hottest firms currently, and designers of the Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, currently under construction, and at 1,000 metres high to be by far the world's tallest building when finished.

156 Front West, seen from the CN Tower, image by AS + GG Architecture for Cadillac Fairview

Last week we only had low-resolution renderings to ponder, this week we can take you in close to see the details revealed by higher-resolution renderings. Plans for the building were recently submitted to Toronto's Planning Department for review. The building, to be situated on the northeast corner of Front and Simcoe Streets, requires zoning by-law amendments before it can proceed.

Detail, 156 Front West, seen from the CN Tower, image by AS + GG Architecture for Cadillac Fairview

The office building's signature on the skyline will be its silvery, tapered and sculpted form, with gentle arcs revealing slightly bulging floor plates between crisp corners. A pair of bowtie shaped slots reveal two-storey openings on both the east and west sides of the building, midway, and most of the way up.

Detail, 156 Front West, seen from the financial core, image by AS + GG Architecture for Cadillac Fairview

A rendering with a vantage point from street level outside of Union Station gives an in-depth view of the slots. Revealed inside the openings are silvery grills, at least on the second floor of each slot, indicating that the HVAC units for the building are likely located at these points in the building. This may leave the enormous glassed-in lantern at the top of the building—the last several floors as pictured above—for other uses.

Detail, 156 Front West, seen from outside of Union Station, image by AS + GG Architecture for Cadillac Fairview

The lower 20-or-so floors of the building's southeast corner is pulled back, as if parted like a pair of curtains, deferring to the 6 and a half-storey high heritage building currently on the site. The façade of the 1905-built structure, a constituent component of the Union Station Heritage Conservation District, would be incorporated into the new complex's base.

Street level at 156 Front West, seen from the southeast, image by AS + GG Architecture for Cadillac Fairview

The view from across Front and Simcoe Streets, below, shows a podium building on Simcoe designed to mirror and visually balance the heritage structure on Front.

Street level at 156 Front West, seen from the southwest, image by AS + GG Architecture for Cadillac Fairview

We await more details. In the meantime, should you want to see even more images of 156 Front West, you will find them in UrbanToronto's dataBase file for the project, linked below. Want to talk about the project? Join the ongoing discussion in the associated Forum thread, or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.