Infrastructure Ontario and
Waterfront Toronto has announced that a consortium led by
HOK architects has been awarded the planning, design and compliance contract for the athletes village to be built in the
West Don Lands to host the Pan American Games in 2015.
Mark Guslits, HOK's senior project director, describes the job as providing "detailed documents that describe all the elements of the village, both the overlay, which relates to the
PanAmerican Games portion of it, as well as the legacy, which is what will remain once the games are over."
The plan is to create accommodations and facilities for the 8,000 athletes expected for the July, 2015 games, and to build it all to a LEED Gold environmental standard. Though there will be some temporary buildings, including welcome centres and meal halls, most of what's built will be converted into a commercial and residential community once the games are over, including both affordable and market-value homes.
The consortium includes
Quadrangle, which will concern itself primarily with the larger buildings on the site,
Dutoit Allsopp Hillier, which will focus on the community-related aspects of the project, and
Montgomery Sisam, whose experience with Infrastructure Ontario projects will, according to Guslits, allow them to be "a guiding influence related to generating the documents in the fashion in which IO expects them."
HOK will take on the sustainability aspects of the village.
Guslits expected the request for qualifications (RFQ) to go out to the developer and builder community in the next couple of weeks, and figures the project as a whole will be done by the end of 2014.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mark Guslits
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