News

It’s settled.

The One, on the southwest corner of Bloor and Yonge streets in the heart of Toronto, is now heading for 91 storeys, not 85, not 94. The Mizrahi Developments tower, aiming to be Canada’s first ‘supertall’ building (300 metres in height through to 600 metres), is steadily climbing skyward, but until last week’s City Council meeting, it was not known exactly how far into the sky that would be. The building, designed by world-renowned Foster + Partners with Toronto’s acclaimed Core Architects, had approval for 85 storeys and 308.6 metres, but an application to go higher, to 94 storeys and 338.3 metres, was pending.

The City opposed the 94-storey mark, as it tries to safeguard sunlight on parks generally across the municipality. In this case, at that height, Jesse Ketchum Park, the bugbear of height fetishists in this part of town, would have had more sunlight blocked by The One’s increased shadow than the City was willing to accept. At 91 storeys and 328.4 metres, however, any increase in shadow was deemed negligible, and the settlement was reached.

The image above, while not a recent high-quality rendering of the 91-storey final version of the building, is the closest of the renderings from over the past years to show what the top of The One will look like, with a double set of 6-storey “hanger” sections above a mechanical section. The two mid-tower mechanical sections showing in this rendering, however, are of different heights, whereas the final design has them at the same thickness. Once new renderings are produced, they will be run on UrbanToronto.

How far along is The One, in the meantime? Some of the best images by our UrbanToronto Forum members of The One from over the last week are included above and below to bring you up-to-date. Above looking northeast today, The One is now about the height of @Benito’s perch in an adjacent building, while below, @Rascacielo caught the opposite view looking southwest across the Bloor-Yonge intersection while the golden glow of the setting sun lit up the building yesterday evening.

Looking directly south two days ago, @thaivic caught a concrete pour underway, the articulated red arm of the concrete pump stretched out like an M in front of the yellow tower crane.

Down at ground level, the quality of the anodized aluminum panels that frame the megacolumns and hangers prompted @skycandy to issue a confident and congratulatory 4 points out of 4, a grade suggested by the building itself.

One of UrbanToronto’s Forum contributors updates the thread from time-to-time with how far along construction has progressed. Earlier this week, @Contra produced the image below, which at the time reflected the sought-after 94-storey count, but which we have since modified to reflect the building’s final 91-storey count. As tall as it is already…

…wow, it’s going to get much, much taller!

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.