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MaRS West Tower?

3K views 15 replies 11 participants last post by  rt_0891 
#1 ·
The rendering shows that there are to be 3 buildings built around an older buildings. So far the East tower (around 15s) and the shorter south building are pretty much complete. Anyone know why they haven't started construction or even excavation on the West tower? They do have equipment on its current site.

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Anyways, I think MaRS along with CCBR (Pharmacy looks a bit bland) might be the nicest looking looking buildings built in Toronto in a while. They both use a lot of nice blue/teal glass and the MaRS buildings really compliment the older building.
 
#6 ·
^^ I'm not sure about the west tower but I think that an Indian pharmaceutical company is one fo the main tenants in the East Tower. Hopefully we'll see some company taking up space in the west tower, it'll be interesting to see how the glass facade meets University ave.

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and You are to Blame, MaRS Discovery District is a 3 tower complex surrounding an older building that is going to be primarily used for office space and medical research.



 
#7 ·
I like this new complex...obviously a great new bio-medical facility...and some great combination of new architecture with old. The old building was pretty much a forgotten building, despite being quite monumental (it's the size of Union Station). They may have lopped off the ends, but it's still a very nice old building...the old one was just lost on the street because it was badly maintained and hidden behind overgrown, scraggly trees.

It's still not finished, but it already looks good...will look even better when complete with new landscaping that will enhance, rather than hide it. I can see people walking past and commenting on how they had no idea what a great old building was there. Why doesn't Hume write about this kind of stuff??















KGB
 
#11 ·
Just my opinion, but to me, I think incorporating new buildings into old ones is becoming a bad cliche, with often poor results.

I just don't see why they had to attach it how they did.

Too badthey couldn't have set the tall part of the new building farther away from the older building so they still looked physically seperate. The perfection and precision-cut shapes of new buildings just don't seem to go well with imperfect and more organic looking older buildings.

I know this sounds stupid, but it's how I feel about it. Projects like this used to be my favourites, and I know exactly why people love them. But imagine in 30 years how outdated the new part will look, and we will have a stillbeautiful old building with a newer section attached that no longer looks nice.

Then again, I am working with myself to respect all ages of architecture, so that I am not offended by such structures.

So, it's all a matter of opinion and time.
 
#12 ·
In this case it looks like the integration of the old and new would have also improved the efficiency of the older building - particularly given the change in use from hospital ward to research facility. It may have been impractical / too costly to update the systems in the older building and retain the older layouts.
 
#13 ·
from the Globe & Mail:

By JOHN ALLEMANG

Saturday, September 17, 2005 Page M2

The first question in the hypothetical MaRS for Dummies, the guidebook that would explain just what is going on at that vast new complex of buildings and bravado near the Discovery District corner of College and University, is this: What's up with the lower-case "a"? And for that matter, the upper-case R and S? And if we may be so bold, what on Earth does it all have to do with the Red Planet?

Let's let Ilse Treurnicht, the CEO of MaRS, handle this. "Actually, it started as a file name, short for Medical and Related Sciences. The abbreviated form had a certain charm and it stuck. Our mandate broadened, so now we're just MaRS -- somewhere far away and mysterious where the world is going to go."

It's catchy and visually provocative, to be sure, but no less mystifying for all that. For five years, the people behind MaRS have been transforming the 1913 College St. wing of the former Toronto General Hospital and building two new towers and a vast atrium for a total of 700,000 square feet of offices -- a campus-like complex that, according to boastful hoardings that surrounded the construction site for years, has something to do with business convergence and scientific excellence and being world-class.

And this is only Phase One, which will have its grand opening on Sept. 26. Phase Two, now getting started, will add an additional 800,000 square feet along University Avenue, including a 200-suite hotel that will house all kinds of brilliant people lured to this world-class research destination. But to what end?

"It's a big engine of serendipity," Ms. Treurnicht says enthusiastically, which may not satisfy the dummies among us, but certainly gets to the heart of the MaRS mission.

MaRS, you see, is one of those high-concept, big-vision, multidisciplinary creations that is meant to defy easy categorization. If it could be defined simply, it wouldn't be doing its job in the global innovation economy it aspires to lead. The essence of MaRS is that everything and everyone you need to turn a scientific discovery into a marketable technology can be found in one place -- "collocation," in MaRS-speak.

When it gets going, MaRS will house 2,000 "knowledge workers," as they are known hereabouts, and about 50 companies committed to bridging the gap with academe. Top researchers of the University of Toronto will rub shoulders with tech-transfer experts and bankers, who are on the spot to provide hope and even cash to start-up firms. "Our strategy," says Ms. Treurnicht, a 49-year-old former South African Rhodes scholar, research chemist and venture capitalist (who also happens to be married to University of Toronto president David Naylor), "is to create an ecosystem where all the groups can learn from one another, a place where entrepreneurs will come looking for the next big thing."

There are wet labs and cafés to trade ideas in, summer barbecues and waffle breakfasts to break down the old barriers, video-conference rooms where you can plug into a forum in Helsinki at 3 a.m. and a lot more going on in the neighbourhood than you would find in one of those low-rent 905-belt industrial parks.

Or, for that matter, in the isolated research labs of Toronto's pre-MaRS days. MaRS was created out of frustration at the way scientific discovery has traditionally been carried out in these parts. "There was a belief," Ms. Treurnicht says, "that we needed to escape from the linear process where the great science of a professor's lab bench bumbles along and more by accident than design links up to business people. Here we have the receptor community already in place and dynamically interacting with each other."

Among MaRS's founders, there was a widespread view that in science as elsewhere, Toronto was not living up to its considerable potential. At the research level, the University of Toronto with its medical faculty and nine affiliated teaching hospitals was a global player. But when the moment came to commercialize its discoveries, it frequently proved to be weak. Given the huge public investment in medical research, and the likelihood that the older industries that were the mainstays of the Ontario economy could go into decline, the decision was made to create a place where critical mass turned ideas into profits.

The moving force behind MaRS was John Evans, former president of the University of Toronto and one of the city's great behind-the-scene strategists and string-pullers. In his own work, as CEO of the Mississauga-based pharmaceutical company Allelix, he had seen the drawbacks of working in isolation. Allelix could not raise enough growth capital and eventually merged with Utah-based NPS Pharmaceuticals. When the American company directed him to establish a downtown office that would exploit the synergies offered by the University of Toronto and its hospitals, serendipity took over -- the University Health Network was selling the site that would become MaRS, the place where Banting and Best conducted their clinical trials for insulin. And so what might well have been just another exclusive condo block turned into something a lot less predictable.

Biotech clusters such as MaRS are in fashion right now -- Singapore is creating the $4-billion Biopolis complex, for example, and older sites such as Boston's Kendall Square and San Diego's Golden Triangle have to compete with newcomers in Kansas, Florida and now downtown Toronto. There is bound to be a shakeout over the next decade, but Ms. Treurnicht believes that the tightly clustered design of MaRS presents a big advantage over car-dependent research parks far from universities, and centres that grew together more randomly.

"This site is steps from the university and the hospital sector, it sits on top of Canada's largest financial district and it's right on the subway line at the heart of a highly creative multicultural city."

Of course, if the rest of the city doesn't quite get MaRS or understand its biotech evangelists, a great opportunity has been lost. That's why MaRS has expanded its mandate beyond structural genomics and materials chemistry to work with entities like the Design Centre -- selling science requires style as well as substance -- and why Ms. Treurnicht delights in showing off stunning inner-body images that represent the latest collaboration of biomedical research and animation.

"We have a mandate to take science to the broader community," she says. "The community needs to see science as an economic engine, and to do that we need to bring science to life."

 
#14 ·
"And this is only Phase One, which will have its grand opening on Sept. 26. Phase Two, now getting started, will add an additional 800,000 square feet along University Avenue, including a 200-suite hotel that will house all kinds of brilliant people lured to this world-class research destination. But to what end?"

There was a phase 2?...a hotel? Wow, never heard about all this. Anyone have anymore info on this phase?
Thanks for the article Travis007
 
#16 ·
Bringing business, scientists together
It's glass and steel, wired and wireless ... and headed by a Rhodes scholar


JUDY STEED
FEATURE WRITER

The land alone cost $30 million. Add another $185 million for construction, double that for outfitting the place and you're looking at close to $400 million to create Toronto's monumental R&D temple — phase one.

It's all about ensuring that intellectual capital created in Canada gets developed in Canada.

Today, light will angle through the glass atrium high above onto granite floors below that are echoing to the sound of scientists moving in to MaRS. The Medical and Related Sciences centre is huge, but what's going on here is even bigger.

After decades of dismal efforts to commercialize research, Toronto's scientific and business communities have come together to make a grand statement about their global aspirations.

The complex will be vast and has evolved from a vision articulated five years ago by Dr. John Evans, a former president of the University of Toronto who was horrified when he heard that the historic site of Toronto General Hospital on College St. was going to be sold for condos.

Instead, there followed a backbreaking fundraising effort and complex negotiations with the University Health Network which owned the land, and conceptualizion of MaRS. Officially opening today, it has involved a cast of thousands.

The centre's chief executive officer, who was charged with actualizing the dream, is Ilse Treurnicht, a multi-tasking former CEO at Primaxis, the Royal Bank venture-capital firm, who also has a Ph.D in chemistry, is a Rhodes Scholar, and been part of a number of start-up companies."MaRS is a platform to commercialize scientific discoveries, to create a globally significant centre that attracts the best people, bringing together science, business and capital under one roof," explains Treurnicht. "The amazing thing is that not only is the centre full, it's full of the right people."

Across from her office, on the other side of the interior "street," stand the restored brick walls of the original Toronto General Hospital which opened in 1913 — where Banting and Best gave free insulin to diabetics over 80 years ago.

Located at 101 College St., on the south side between University Avenue and Elizabeth St., this is now the "Heritage Building" and central entrance of the 700,000-square-foot behemoth that is MaRS.

Yes it's big, "very un-Canadian, the rapidity with which it's happening, the scale of the ambition, the global play," says Dale Martin, who leads the MaRS real estate group that's building and leasing the space. "We've got over 50 organizations moving in, from start-ups to NPS Pharma (formerly called Allelix), Merck Frosst, RBC Technology Ventures, the Canadian Medical Discoveries Fund, MDS Sciex, Heenan Blaikie, Ogilvy Renault . . . "

Treurnicht, from her place at the helm, is keenly aware of the potential of MaRS multiple players — and amazed to find herself in the right place, at the right time, given the twists and turns of her complex life.

Her husband is David Naylor, president-designate of the University of Toronto; the parents of four children, they're selling their house and moving into U of T's official residence

Raised in Johannesburg, the second of three children, Treurnicht's first language was Afrikaans. South Africa was in the grip of apartheid and her extended family "spanned the political spectrum," she says. A competitive track and field athlete, she and her teammates were banned from international events because of the boycott against South Africa. On student council at the University of Stellenbosch, she was active "on the reform side of council."

After the 1976 Soweto riots — in which South African police killed more than 600 people — she wanted to "have an experience outside. That's one reason I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship." Her parents couldn't afford to educate her abroad.

In 1979 at the age of 23, armed with a master's degree in chemistry, she left South Africa for Oxford University. "I loved Oxford. It was a magical time. The graduate student population was phenomenally international."

Among nine women to integrate a men's college, she arrived with a bicycle and a suitcase — "the only possessions I had." She thought she'd get into sports medicine, she started rowing — a popular sport at Oxford — but did her Ph.D in chemistry, spending a lot of time "in a smelly lab," doing research on new kinds of plastics.

Then she met another ambitious Rhodes scholar, David Naylor, out of Woodstock, Ont., where his father owned the local movie theatre.

Their connection was "instant," she says. When he went back to Canada, "I came here to do my post-doc, to see if I could survive the winters. It was fine."

They had four children — two girls now 18 and 16, two boys who are 12 and 13. "It wasn't possible to do everything at once," she says. "David had a big job as CEO of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences." So Treurnicht "took a detour" to run a consulting business from home. An adept multi-tasker, she worked with young companies and large industry associations, ran research programs, helped raise capital — and kept the home fires burning.

Then, after 10 years of consulting, "I was ready to get involved in a more team-based environment." When Naylor became Dean of Medicine at U of T, she joined Primaxis Technology Ventures Inc. as president and CEO — and first employee. It was 1999, just as the tech boom was soaring to unsustainable heights.

Primaxis had a $55 million fund to invest in wireless, semi-conductor, photonics, telecommunications, IT, advanced materials and manufacturing. Among its investors were RBC Technology Ventures, Ohio-based Battelle, one of the world's largest R&D funds, the UK's BTG and Dupont Canada.

"It's still too early to tell," how the Primaxis portfolio of a dozen companies will do, she says, "but they raised over $500 million mostly from outside Canada. They had all the classic challenges of start-ups, and they're now in the harvesting phase."

"There is terrific innovation in Canada," she says. At MaRS, she hopes to be "hands-on. I absolutely love start-ups, I admire the energy and passion of entrepreneurs."

Ultimately, she says, "it's all about people, talent, connectivity. We've all seen great technologies go nowhere. I think back on early-stage companies I worked with in the 1980s — there was no MaRS, no place to go for information, networking, market research. Now we're here.

``The baby companies in our incubator space will co-exist with more mature companies. There is nothing like this in the world, to have all this in proximity to the enormous research engine (of Toronto's hospitals and universities), close to the financial district, on the subway line, in the heart of this multicultural city.

``That's where the magic is, and we want the community to take ownership of this remarkable serendipity engine, this convergence place."

The bottom line, for Treurnicht, is "the whole notion of collaboration. One of our competitive strengths will be our ability to collaborate."

And yes, this being Canada, Tim Horton's will open in the basement food court on Oct. 1.
 
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