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Located immediately to the west of The Well in Downtown Toronto, Portland Commons has quickly joined its neighbour on the list of the city’s most intriguing projects, with its eye-catching design from Sweeny&Co Architects emerging more prominently by the week as construction continues to make steady progress. From the development team of Carttera Private Equities and WolfeCorp, the commercial development is only a few floors away from reaching its final 15-storey height, while down closer to ground level, the last month has seen the building’s exterior finishes come together neatly along the street-fronting elevations.
The main component of the exterior treatment is its glazing system, which is made up of prefabricated panels already outfitted with glass, insulation, and mullions, a system referred to as unitized curtainwall. The installation process, pictured in the image below, sees the individual panels installed one at a time with the help of a mobile crane unit. The panels are lowered by the crane and guided into place manually by another worker, who fixes them onto a set of mounts already clipped onto the edge of the concrete slabs. (Note that the operable windows have yet to be installed in the panels, currently only filled by plywood pieces. Fins have yet to be installed over the full-floor-height unfinished sections too — finished sections of that can be seen two images down.)
The glazing process has been underway since February, beginning at the second level, and has made significant progress sealing the building’s lowest floors since that time. Referring to the image below, we can see that, on the western elevation fronting Portland Street, the building is glazed up to the fourth floor. The image also shows us that work on the building’s sixth-floor cantilever, pictured on the left edge of the frame, has resulted in the construction of the overhanging slab, supported by the 70-foot diagonal steel struts. Featuring a steel construction, rather than concrete, the cantilevered slab wraps around the building and travels south along the east elevation, employing a total of 11 struts to support its load.
For a more in depth look at the eleven steel struts that support the cantilever, and how these massive structural members were installed, check out this video by Carttera about the process:
Meanwhile, returning to the facade, the last few weeks have seen the appearance of the primary design motif of the building’s lower levels, the bronze-tinted fins. Working in concert with cladding panels of the same colour, the fins are a big part of how the building is perceived at the pedestrian scale, and add the warmth of colour to the design while also creating more dramatic shadows across the facade. The image below captures the fourth floor fins on the western elevation, with the strips of insulation below representing where the next fins will be installed.
Finally, viewing the site from a wider angle, we can see the extent of progress made in the forming of the building’s concrete frame. As of late April, the structure had been completed up to the 11th floor, with a fresh set of concrete forms in place to begin the creation of the 12th floor slab. Only the southernmost portion of the building will reach the peak height of 15-storeys, while a number of step-backs will reduce the scale of the building as it moves north.
Concrete work will continue for the next few months before the project will be able to celebrate its topping off, while exterior finishing work makes progress of its own down below. The glazing system offers the first preview of the project’s extensive sustainability mandate, which has positioned the development in pursuit of both LEED Platinum and WELL Gold certifications.
UrbanToronto will continue to follow progress on this development, but in the meantime, you can learn more about it from our Database file, linked below. If you'd like, 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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