Located on a full city block 725 Granville Street forms the southernmost portion of the Pacific Center complex in Vancouver. Home to Eaton’s and later Sears, the original building was designed by Cesar Pelli of Gruen Associates along with local architects McCarter Nairne & Partners. Completed in 1972,  the building featured a floor plate nearly as large as the city block it occupied and white precast concrete panels on majority of its facades.  

The architectural vision for the redevelopment of the site was to create transparency and interaction at street level. All exterior cladding of the existing building was removed and replaced with a new building envelope. The existing 7 storey super structure was retained and utilized to house Nordstrom’s flagship retail store on the first 3 floors, and the remaining 4 floors were converted to commercial office space. The redevelopment also includes a new lower level multi-store retail mall, underneath Nordstrom, which directly connects to the existing Pacific Centre Mall.

The building is generally divided into three horizontal sections: base, middle, and top. The base section is primarily full height glazing to allow for transparency and openness at grade. This glazing alternates with stone cladding to anchor the development. Landscape design is re-introduced around the development to further enhance the architecture by tempering the existing building scale at grade and unifying the surrounding urban contexts. The fully glazed middle section responds directly to its context, taking advantage of the natural light and urban views. Deep curtain wall cap extensions add another layer of texture while enhancing passive solar performance. The top section provides a notable datum denoting the building’s height with a generous roof overhang that also provides a solar relief to the upper floor terrace. The redevelopment achieves LEED Gold certification for Office Core and Shell.