For the past few years, those of us that are slaves to their cars during the day (it’s an occupational hazard for me…) have no doubt driven by the Bay/Adelaide centre hundreds and hundreds of times.

Finally, the monstrosity is nearing completion, and tenants began to move in during the month of July.

Here’s one thing that I did not know about the building: it’s supposedly green-friendly!

“The Latest In Cool”

Angela Kryhul
Special to the Globe & Mail

September 15th, 2009

It’s not obvious, at first glance, why Toronto’s new 43-storey RBC Centre is being touted as an office tower for the 21st century. But a closer look at the building’s south and west-facing sides reveal sleek horizontal sunshades attached to the exterior glass facade, part of a state-of-the-art daylight harvesting design and just one indication of the building’s environmental sophistication.

This year, downtown Toronto is being flooded with 3.14 million square feet of new office space as the finishing touches are put on the RBC Centre (1.2 million square feet), Bay Adelaide Centre (1.16 million square feet) and Telus Tower (780,000 square feet). Each tower is a showpiece of environmental design and energy efficiency and has been built to qualify for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification.

It was back in 2003 when the Royal Bank of Canada approached the developer community with its criteria for a distinctive new flagship office building. RBC wanted to create a workplace that reflected its corporate values, including those related to the environment, human resources and business growth goals, says Linda Mantia, senior vice-president, procurement and corporate real estate for RBC.

“We were looking at our lease maturities, the growth of our business, our strategy for our office personnel … if we were going to have a flagship location, we wanted it to align very strongly with the values of our organization,” Ms. Mantia explains.

Developer Cadillac Fairview Corp. proved to be on the same wavelength and got the project under way at Wellington and Simcoe streets in 2006. Leveraging its considerable clout as a lead tenant, RBC stipulated that the new space had to meet LEED environmental standards, and recognize that employees have a right to daylight, Ms. Mantia says.

Which brings us back to the sunshades. The slim blades, attached to the first 10 floors of the building’s exterior glass, or curtain wall, are designed to reduce glare while still allowing the maximum amount of daylight into the building. The high-tech part of the system, however, is on the interior side of the 3.5-metre floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Inside, at about the 2.5-metre level, horizontal light shelves adjust throughout the day to reflect daylight into the centre of each floor. The shelves are controlled by sensors, which dim the interior lights on sunny days and activate a roller-blind system to control glare.

“It’s a form of daylight harvesting,” explains Wayne Barwise, senior vice-president, office development for Cadillac Fairview. “As you put that light into the centre of the floor, not as much artificial light is required and you save on electricity.”

In fact, there are no drop ceilings fitted with harsh fluorescents in this building. Pendant fixtures reflect 92 per cent of artificial light off exposed concrete ceilings, with only the remaining 8 per cent shining down on the workspace. And all of the telecommunications wiring, and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning pipes are housed in a 45- centimetre, raised-floor space. This allows office workers to set heating and cooling comfort levels via floor diffusers, which are located about every 180 square feet.

The RBC Centre has a rainwater storage system which is used to flush toilets and urinals, it uses Enwave’s Deep Lake Water Cooling and steam heating system, and 99 per cent of the waste resulting from the building’s construction was recycled, Mr. Barwise says.

Much of the space leased by lead tenants RBC and RBC Dexia is open concept, and features “oasis” zones – collaborative workspaces outfitted with comfortable chairs and wireless Internet access. This kind of space, which gets people working in teams, was an important factor for RBC, Ms. Mantia says, from a staff recruitment and retention perspective. Many of the windows up to the 10th floor can be opened.

“I think we have a pretty enlightened generation of people coming into the work force … that really care about the place where they work. So we saw it as incredibly important to provide a comfortable work environment for our employees,” she says.

RBC and RBC Dexia started moving staff into the building in late June, and by November will have 5,000 workers occupying 775,000 square feet on floors two through 24. The other major tenants in the RBC Centre, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International and Buck Consultants Ltd., are in the process of moving in a total of 2,000 employees, Mr. Barwise says.

With more than three million square feet of new, high quality office space hitting the market at virtually the same time, and with Telus Communications the only major new entrant, Mr. Barwise says the downtown core is currently experiencing a “shuffling around of tenants.”

Some of the landlords who have lost big tenants to the three new towers are retrofitting their older buildings to bring them up to snuff, Mr. Barwise says. As more big tenants, such as RBC, start demanding environmentally responsible and energy-efficient office spaces, Mr. Barwise says he expects there to be greater segmentation of the market with prospective tenants assessing space according to whether it is LEED Silver, Gold, or non-certified space.

“If you build a building today and it’s not LEED Gold and not environmentally sustainable, in 10 years time [tenants] won’t lease in your building, period,” Mr. Barwise says.

“Government policy is requiring these energy savings, businesses are requiring them and employees are demanding that their employers be more socially and environmentally conscious.”

Ms. Mantia, who is co-chairing a sub-committee of the Greening Greater Toronto initiative that encourages landlords to accelerate green retrofit plans, says the RBC Centre is not a one-off for the corporation.

The company is using its RBC Centre experience as a benchmark for improving all of its leased office environments.

“It is putting a lot of pressure on our incumbent landlords to show us that their older buildings are being retrofitted to meet some of our requirements. This isn’t just about the new and shiny buildings. It’s about how landlords collaborate with their tenants in existing buildings,” Ms. Mantia explains.

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I remember being in grade three or four when I first heard the word “recycle.”  It was a buzz-word, no doubt, but even as a child I was somewhat sceptical that we would continue to slave to this thing called “the environment.”

Despite my gold-star winning performance in Ms. Masotti’s classroom whereby we changed the words to Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” to “Bad Pollution,” I wasn’t sure that everybody else would catch on.

Well here we are in 2009 and the Bay/Adelaide Centre and the RBC Centre have designed their new buildings with GREEN in mind.  Individuals may compost in their own yards and others might not use consumer products if they’re bad for the environment, but I never thought I’d see the day when the big corporate machine would get a conscience and implement rainwater storage systems in their 50-storey commercial towers!

It’s rather ironic that across the street from the Bay/Adelaide Centre is the new Trump Towers, which comes with a certain brand and stigma of “rich, luxury” but really it’s just a sign of excess and waste.

On one side of the street, you have overpriced condos that are bought by self-loving richie-riches who think that owning part of Trump will somehow further elevate their stature.  And on the other side of the street, you have a landmark, trailblazing building that was designed with a purpose in mind: save energy and respect the environment.

Condominiums are beginning to seek out the LEED certification in hopes of attracting those buyers who care about energy consumption and green-friendly buildings.  “Rezen” on Frederick Street came with a GOLD certification, and at some point down the road you have to think that this will provide an above-average appreciation for the condo owners.

So with a handful of residential condominiums and now three very notable commercial towers stressing green-friendly, you have to wonder: is this simply a fad set to capitalize on a hot button issue, or is this slowly becoming the norm?