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It has been roughly a year since we last visited the site of Cityzen Development Group and Fernbrook Homes's Ion Condos, a 9-storey condominium development at Keele and Wilson. The Architecture Unfolded-designed building is quite unique from an engineering perspective, utilizing and adapting a pre-existing 5-storey above-ground parking garage, and incorporating it into the base of a new 11-storey, 200-unit condominium residence.
In our previous article, we provided a breakdown of the development's complicated engineering challenges which lay ahead, and in the time since, the project has made significant progress. The parking garage, which once served a hotel formerly located to the west, will soon be clad and incorporated into the design, ultimately serving residents of the new building's 200 condominium units.
To secure the new condominium above the existing parking garage, new columns and footings were constructed throughout the existing structure, transferring the new structural loads down to a layer of undisturbed soil below ground, while the existing structure acts as horizontal bracing for the new columns. Meanwhile, the reuse of the garage presents a major win for the local environment as energy was not expended to tear the structure down and then rebuild from scratch.
Ion is now topped off at its final height of 11 storeys, with most of the new build now sealed off from the elements by a dark blue tinted glazing. A similar glass is now being installed around the balconies. While the glazing is a major element in the project's final aesthetic, the building's most prominent exterior feature are the stepped terraces which rise along Ion's eastern elevation.
Additional information and renderings of this project can be found in our Ion Condos dataBase file, linked below. Want to get involved in the discussion? Check out the associated Forum threads, or leave a comment in the space provided at the bottom of this page.
