Harry and Meghan have married in a spectacular and historic building, but in Markle’s life there was already another unique building, that of the popular Suits series: a Canadian skyscraper.
Last Saturday we attended the marriage bond between Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle. Many will have discovered in that link to world-class personalities, the fervor with which the British accompanied the ceremony and the makeshift red carpet, full of celebrities from the film world who accompanied the actress, especially her fellow Suits series, who they didn’t want to miss the important moment.
Others will have discovered the wonderful Chapel of St. George, where the marriage alliance took place, a temple built in the thirteenth century and rebuilt between 1475 and 1528, applying the Gothic style of what it presumes today. This magnificent building has witnessed numerous royal weddings, if its ribbed vault and its spectacular windows speak…
The already Duchess of Sussex expressed her desire to end her acting career when she married, however, it will remain for the annals of history as one of the few people who married twice the same year: once in reality and once in the fiction, since his alter-ego, Rachel Zone, married Mike Ross (actor Patrick J. Adams) in the last episode in which they acted together. A farewell rose for a series that has marked trend in a matter of elegance.
For the followers of the series (I am one) Rachel’s workplace is the Pearson Hardman law firm, located in an undefined building in New York (always New York), where Zone and Ross met and where it was “perpetrated” the wedding of both (the fake one, to understand us). But that building is not in the most popular city on the planet, but in the city of Toronto, Canada.
The skyscraper in which most of the series is rolled is called Bay Adelaide West, it is 52 stories high with an architectural cusp that reaches 214 meters and makes it the 12th tallest building in Toronto and the 17th in Canada . It houses 125,000 square meters of constructed area, has five floors below ground level and 32 elevators ready to lift its users.
The interior of the building where many scenes from the series were recordedIf Suits claims to be an elegant and modern series, it is no less the skyscraper on which it is rolled, a stylized tower whose construction began in 2006 and ended in 2010. His design team, the WZMH architects, had plenty of time to improve the tower, since it was projected in 1979, and no, it is not that they took it easy, it is that the economic turbulence of the time paralyzed the performance for almost thirty years.
But it is well what ends well, the tower is now accompanied by a quasi-twin, the Bay Adelaide East, whose construction ended in 2015 with 45 floors high and an aesthetic very similar to the West tower. Both have a high sustainability rating, reaching the LEED Gold certificate in the West, and the LEED Platinum certificate in the East, both on the outside and inside.
A spectacular 3-story lobby provides plenty of natural light, there you can enjoy the work of Californian artist James Turrell, called Straight Flush, consisting of five panels of led lights (always led’s) that are constantly changing. Around the complex an extensive green area of more than 2,000 square meters, where you can escape from work and the city, how many walks will Meghan have taken there?
The skyscraper cost about 320 million Canadian dollars, in exchange, about 210 euros. This money was used to make a mixed structure, with a central core of reinforced concrete and pillars and metal structure slabs of the ArcelorMittal company. This company has developed thinner sections of steel that allow to increase the benefits while saving up to 22 percent of weight, reducing, in passing, CO2 emissions (Bravo!), Eye, emissions are not only reduced by use of less steel, also because the transport entails less fuel expense (a three in one).
The company tells us that 2,600 tons of steel were used in the East Tower, saving 9 percent on the weight of the entire structure. The construction company, EllisDon Construction Services Inc., boasts the complexity that was supposed to be built by integrating the facade of a historic 1926 building, thus, the huge glass facade does not glare under its enormous “aesthetic weight”, on the contrary, it enhances it.
The complex has more than 3,000 square meters for shops and restaurants, as well as direct access to the PATH (underground networks that connect the city through the underground). It has parking for 1,100 vehicles, 30 preferred spaces for electric, hybrid or shared use vehicles, thus promoting a sustainable mentality. Of course, it has 350 bicycle parking lots, with its lockers and changing areas.
The glass facade continues until the coronation of the building, where it fades elegantly, disappearing from sight and integrating with the Ontario sky. Although Markle has left the series, they say it will continue at least one more season. So we will continue to admire the landscapes of Manhattan placed as murals on the walls of the majestic and sustainable Bay Adelaide West. That the magic of the cinema never stops, and the architectural one, neither.