(article en anglais pour l'instant, traduction à venir)
News Story
New Telus building a sign of the times
By Jim Donnelly, Ottawa Business Journal Staff
Wed, Aug 16, 2006 3:00 PM EST
Construction workers on the job at the site of the new Telus building at Slater and Bank. (Darren Brown, OBJ)
The new Telus corporate building being speedily erected at the apex of Bank and Slater streets is a clear sign of sweet economic times, say local high tech and commercial building observers.
"It's part of the whole overall economic turnaround," says says Jeffrey Dale, president and CEO of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI). "The downtown core has to have additional buildings built, just to provide the additional square footage that was needed."
Indeed, Colliers International's most recent commercial building report says Ottawa's downtown commercial office space availability lies at a tight 3.9 per cent, and won't be loosening anytime soon with federal government and corporate demand high for new office space. Naturally, he says, that means new buildings for Ottawa – most, however, won't be available until at least 2007.
Buildings like Morguard's 131 Queen, Oxford's Constitution Square Phase III, Brookfield's Place de Ville Phase III and Minto's 180 Kent are all expected to come into the market within the next year, along with Telus' new offering. But Mr. Dale says the most favourable aspect of Telus' building is that it's not just new office space for the federal government – it's corporate office space, branded with style.
"(The best part is that) they're corporate buildings – we're now getting a corporate look and feel to our downtown rather than just like in the past, where it's just been government-type buildings," he says. "These are now branded buildings with major, corporate Canadian brand names on them, which is very positive for Ottawa."
Telus' state-of-the-art 'green' building will consolidate 300 Ottawa-area employees currently spread out through the city, will have approx. 105,000 square feet of office space in an eight storey tower with two floors of underground parking, a fitness centre, conference facilities and outside terraces.
The building is LEED (Leadership in Engineering and Environmental Design) silver certified, meaning it uses natural light, heating and cooling techniques (among other things) to reduce its environmental footprint during both construction and operation.The ground floor will also feature a limited amount of retail space fronting both Bank and Slater streets.
The building was designed and is being built by Montreal's Broccolini Construction.
"As you know, our tagline is 'The future is friendly,'" says Telus executive VP: corporate affairs Janet Yale. "So we've got to put our money where our mouth is, if you will, and if we're not going to look at ways in which we can ensure the buildings are healthy and high-performance for our employees in the space, as well as the impact the building has on the environment, then we're not living our values."
Construction of the new building goes hand-in-hand with the launch last fall of the Telus Ottawa community board, a new philanthropic program through which Telus has announced intentions to donate $500,000 per year to local charities, and comes hot on the heels of strong Telus financial results for the recent quarter.
Locating the building downtown, rather than tech-heavy Kanata was a no-brainer for a service-oriented company, she says.
"We really wanted to put down roots in the Ottawa community with a state of the art building in the middle of downtown Ottawa," says Ms. Yale. "What better way to say that Telus is present in Ottawa, and doing it in a way that makes it clear we're a high-tech company, with state of the art technology.
"Since the government is one of our largest customers, we wanted to be able to bring our customers to a state of the art facility and be able to showcase our technology to them."
http://www.ottawabusinessjournal.com/319853047711252.php |
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