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At the Bay Adelaide Centre in Toronto's Financial District, the cranes are now down from the third and final tower. After earlier plans to build a single tower here were quashed in the recession of the late 1980s, Brookfield Property Partners reworked plans in the 2000s for three towers. Following the complex's 51-storey, 2009-built West Tower and 44-storey, 2016-built East Tower, the final phase dubbed Scotiabank North Tower at Bay Adelaide Centre is at its final height of 32 storeys, and gearing up for an early 2022 completion.
The KPMB Architects and Adamson Associates Architects-designed tower has been under construction for about three years now, construction having begun in late 2018/ We last checked in at the start of 2021 when the building was approaching a final height of 140.2 metres. After topping out earlier this year, the structural phase of the project was complete, with Walters Group having supplied 9,300 tons of structural steel and 850,000 ft² of metal decking to construct the new office tower.
Construction of the tower was carried out with a pair of Link-Belt TG2300B cranes supplied by New Jersey-based Cornell Crane & Steel, originally developed for power plant construction and now regularly used in the construction of large-scale builds ranging from offshore oil platforms to high-rise construction projects like this one. Both of these cranes were recently disassembled following the conclusion of major lifting activity. Among these, one crane was anchored atop a specialized cantilevered grillage system due to the complicated logistics of building on a constrained Financial District site.
In the months since topping out, work has been progressing on the minimalist cladding, and behind it. The building envelope of reflective light blue-tinted glass reached the 13th floor at the start of the year, and now extends to the tower's roofline. Glazing has begun to fill in the spots recently vacated by the cranes' exterior mounts, while the upcoming disassembly of exterior construction hoists will allow the final tower glazing to be installed.
Scotiabank North Tower is named for its anchor tenant, with the banking giant having leased over half of the building, taking up 420,000 ft² of the 810,344 ft² tower. Scotiabank will maintain its anchor status and footprint in flagship Scotia Plaza just steps away, expanding the bank's Financial District presence with the new space at Bay Adelaide Centre.
You can learn more from our Database file for the project, linked below. If you'd like to, you can join in on the conversation in the associated Project Forum thread, or leave a comment in the space provided on this page.
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