The Tallest Office Tower in Vancouver Is Also the Most Sustainable

After a series of unanticipated delays – including a global pandemic and unprecedented flooding along British Columbia’s major supply corridors – Oxford Properties has finally put the finishing touches on its newest AAA office tower, The Stack, at 1133 Melville Street in Vancouver. While the building opened its doors to tenants in April 2023, the official launch took place on September 12.

At 530 feet (162 metres), the building is the tallest in Vancouver, despite consisting of only 37 floors, a result of its high-ceiling design. It’s also one of two pilot projects developed as part of the Canada Green Building Council’s (CaGBC) zero carbon framework.

“It is so important to us as a leader in the industry to be on the cutting edge of providing sustainable buildings for our customers,” said Ted Mildon, Oxford’s vice president of office leasing and operations, in an interview with LoopNet. He called the building “a jewel in the crown” of Oxford’s global portfolio and stressed how the building “was designed for the long term to bring people together and have them congregate in a great space.”

Oxford Properties – the real estate arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) – acquired the site in 2010 and broke ground in 2017. The Stack was developed in partnership with Canada Pension Plan Investments (CPPI), as part of a 1.5 million-square-foot portfolio of offices across six buildings in Vancouver.

Anchor tenants at The Stack include accounting firm Ernst & Young and law firms Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP (Blakes) and DLA Piper. Other tenants include Canaccord Genuity, PlentyOfFish Media and the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). A ground level retail space is occupied by Nook Restaurant and the second floor houses a conference and fitness centre.

The building’s name stems from its unconventional design, consisting of four “boxes” stacked one atop the other, each geared toward a different type of tenant. The bottom box, spanning floors 3 to 11, has larger floorplates of around 22,300 square feet (6,797 square meters), with an open-office design geared toward tech companies and other firms that favor more collaborative work styles.

Box two spans floors 12 to 17 and features a mix of open and traditional office spaces spread out over an average 16,700-square-foot (5,090 square meters) floorplate. Finally, the top two boxes, spanning floors 19 to 36, are geared to professional services firms, with closed offices and floorplates just under 14,000 square feet (4,267 square meters).

After early designs for the site drawn up by a different architect were rejected by city planners, James KM Cheng Architects was brought on to push the envelope on the building’s design. This was done as a means of gaining approval for additional height and density under Vancouver’s notoriously selective discretionary zoning policies, which exist to protect natural light and sight lines of the mountains from within the city.

“They want you to earn the right to build to the maximum or even exceed the maximum,” said founder James Cheng. “I knew that just going back with another glass box straight up to the sky wasn’t going to cut it. You have to be creative to earn the right to develop a landmark building.”

With that in mind, Cheng set about putting a twist on the traditional office tower design – literally. The third box of The Stack is rotated so that its floorplates sit at an angle from the boxes above and below it. Since the site is located at the intersection of two city grids – one laid out north-south and the other parallel to the nearby shoreline – the skewed design also means the building responds to its urban environment.

“You can look at the building and actually understand the geometry of the streets below,” said Cheng.

The rotation of the third box also creates natural covered terrace spaces on floors 17 and 27, in addition to terraces on floors five, 12 and 19 created by staggering the boxes horizontally. A ground-level pocket park and a shared 6,500-square-foot (604 square meters) rooftop deck round out the outdoor amenity space. The latter is capable of hosting events of up to 270 people and offers “stunning” views of Burrard Inlet and the North Shore Mountains, according to Mildon.

The Stack is the first high-rise commercial office tower to achieve the CaGBC’s zero carbon building - design standard certification. Features contributing to that certification include triple-pane glazing on all windows, rainwater management and enhanced air tightness. On-site renewable energy is achieved using a rooftop photovoltaic solar panel array.

“By using triple glazing, it's like a passive wall system,” Cheng said. “It keeps the building cool in the summer and warm in the winter.”

“We also did 3D modeling to show how much sun each part of the building gets exposed to, and the mechanical systems reuse rejected heat where we need the energy,” he added.

The Stack also achieved LEED v4 Platinum Core and Shell certification, deploying smart building technology to provide insights on energy management, optimize building performance and enable preventative maintenance.

In 2015, Oxford set out to reduce its carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2025. In 2021, the company announced it had exceeded its goal, reducing its portfolio carbon intensity by 37 percent, four years ahead of schedule.

“We had some very driven senior leadership who saw that this was an important trend and said we need to make some good long-term commitments to make our buildings better for the environment,” Mildon said.

The large outdoor terraces are among the 20,000 square feet (1,858 square meters) of amenity spaces Oxford chose to include in their design of The Stack. “When we built MNP Tower [a nearby office tower also owned by Oxford] in 2015, we saw the importance of a great amenity set,” Mildon said. “From curb to suite, we have to be on our A-game.”

Amenities at The Stack include a 5,000-square-foot (465 square meters) gym, a yoga studio, sauna-equipped end-of-trip facilities for up to 250 cyclists and customized lockers for receiving online deliveries. Programming includes a run club, yoga classes and concierge-curated events such as Scotch and Suits nights and cornhole tournaments.

The team also designed the offices themselves to be more attractive to today’s users, with ample natural light and clean air. “When we talk to prospective tenants, they tell us one of their biggest challenges is recruiting and retaining staff,” Cheng said. “That’s starting to change the dynamics of how you design an office building.”

To add space and natural light, ceilings in The Stack are between 12 and 14 feet high and windows are nine and a half feet, which is anywhere from a foot to six inches taller than most of the competitive set in the market, Mildon said.

Other features include targeted and indirect lighting, pinpoint thermal control, enhanced security and an elevator ratio of one elevator for every 38,000 square feet, offering lobby-to-rooftop trips in 30.5 seconds. The lower section of the building also features operable windows to allow outdoor air into the workspaces.