Reprint of an article published by the Montr al Gazette on Apr. 11, 2022
Office Space Renovations Imagine you were building an office tower when the pandemic hit and Canada's offices were frozen in time. Heck, imagine you were building two of them in the middle of downtown Toronto, proper trophy towers for a big bank, and then for a while at least, nobody went to offices at all. They weren't even allowed to. And then office workers started saying they might not want to ever go back, not like before anyway. What would you do? What might you change for the new normal?
Spring has sprung at the post-pandemic office. All across North America, big corporate offices are like dry riverbeds after the rain. Last week it was Google. This week it will be Apple. TD just announced plans.
The mood is vibrant but tense, with one recent poll showing 81 per cent of Toronto area office workers posted to their homes are happier that way. More than half say they would be comfortable returning to the office in some way, but they are not terribly keen on it, and everyone seems to agree that the old ways of office attendance are gone like the snows of yesteryear.
The first Toronto office tower to open post lockdown, CIBC SQUARE on Bay Street across from the Scotiabank Arena, is very nice, the kind of place you might like to spend a day, even a whole work week. The National Post spent a morning there to see plenty of reasons why, all chosen and designed with care, and then rethought and fine-tuned under the wild pressure of a global pandemic that threatened the very concept of the office itself.
Despite high productivity levels while working from home, as shown in the U.K. and Canada, some experts worry about burnout as increased productivity can lead to more stress.
Working from home is more productive than going to the office, U.K. data shows.
Lying in a hospital bed and recovering from his heart attack, Jonathan Frostick posted a photo of himself to LinkedIn and resolved to change the way he was living and working. His post has since gone viral.
I'm not spending all day on zoom anymore': Heart attack prompts man's viral rules for living
The pandemic sparked a massive forced experiment, said Jonathan Pearce, executive vice president of leasing and development at Ivanho Cambridge, which broke ground on this first CIBC SQUARE tower in 2017, and is now building the second nearby across the railway tracks to the north.
This experiment, about what an office tower should be like after a pandemic, demonstrated what Pearce calls a fusion of asset classes. Just as retail merges with logistics, so too does office space merge with hospitality.
So the basic strategy was to make these new office towers more pleasant to be in. Pearce said they tried to pivot their offerings to focus more on the office experience, on what you don't have at home.
I don't think people are going to come in to sit on Zoom calls. Companies and landlords are naive if they expect that to happen, Pearce said. We were headed the right way, but the pandemic forced us to amplify those services, more focused on hospitality, and more focused on what people don't have.
The effort is to return time to the employee, to make the commute worthwhile rather than strictly necessary. It becomes a third place, Pearce said, after work and home.
One early focus that declined in importance as the pandemic went on was the goal of not touching things. Some elements remain in the design, like the building app that sends guests a QR code to scan at entry gates and also programs the elevator to take them to the right floor, with no button pushing at all. But the science on pandemic safety found this was not a main vector of viral spread. So there are door knobs. Some things have buttons. Some things don't change permanently.
Our conviction from a cultural standpoint was that people wanted to be around other people and this vision of permanently working from home will not come to pass, said Avi Tesciuba, Canada country head at Hines, a real estate firm that partnered with Ivanho Cambridge in the CIBC Square project.
So there is a tenants-only fourth floor canopy deck with harvest tables and a concierge station and places to sit and gather. Meals are similarly prioritized, with offerings modelled on the idea of food trucks, where vendors can cycle in and out of smaller stations, and chairs and stools and benches that are not bolted to the floor, as in the typical franchised basement food court. A white table cloth restaurant from an established name is in the works but not yet announced.
Across downtown on Duncan Street, media conglomerate Thomson Reuters is soon to open its Toronto Technology Centre, where construction started in 2017. A final interior design was ready by early 2020, but the lockdown inspired major changes on the fly. These changes, in turn, will serve as a real-life test of the company's plans for five new floors in a 57-floor tower to be built above the existing five.
The building is heritage designated, the old Southam Press Building, built in 1908, four years after fire wrecked Toronto's downtown. The project is to design a modern office into an old warehouse that still stands as a relic of a mighty Canadian company long since gone, but with newspaper titles that continue, including this one, which is curious because Thomson Reuters is majority owned by the Thomson family, which also owns The Globe and Mail.
Here near the theatres, the office real estate vibe is a little more bohemian. They do not need to reproduce any food truck vibes. Their employees can just step outside. Here, the most promising lunch is not at that harvest table on the private mezzanine above the marble-clad lobby, but across the street at a casual basement noodle bar run by Toronto's best loved Th
North America Stories
06/12/2025
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. A new survey from Pixitmedia by Datacore revealed a major shift in the Media & Entertainment industry in media archiving, with 85% of resp...
06/12/2025
HACKENSACK, N.J. LiveU has announced that the national public broadcaster Czech Television has completed one of the largest LiveU live production deployments fo...
06/12/2025
NEW YORK The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) presented the Excellence in Production Technology Emmy Award to NASA+ and Dr. Tom Leight...
05/12/2025
2025 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame: Curt Gowdy Jr. - Master Storyteller, Nati...
05/12/2025
SVG Sit-Down: Veritone's Sean King on the Power of Mining Video, Audio DataThe company's Data Refinery offers users total control and governance over da...
05/12/2025
Platinum White Paper: Inside the Nashville Predators' Unified, Flexible, Sca...
05/12/2025
Netflix Reaches Agreement To Acquire Warner Bros. Following Planned WBD SplitThe deal does not include WBDs sports assets like TNT Sports (US, UK, LatAm), Euros...
05/12/2025
FOX Sports Returns to Indianapolis for Primetime Broadcast of Big Ten Championsh...
05/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Digital Engagement & Monetization Workshop Tackles the ...
05/12/2025
Atlanta United Lights Up New Emory Healthcare Studio With First Live Broadcast f...
05/12/2025
As Messi Takes the Pitch, MLS, Apple, NEP Roll Out Largest MLS Cup Production Ev...
05/12/2025
ESPN Enters College Football's Most Intense Month With Elevated Workflows fo...
05/12/2025
It's about that time! Awards season is in full swing, and the Film Independe...
05/12/2025
LOS ANGELES Netflix announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire the assets of Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion....
05/12/2025
NEW YORK Nielsens Gracenote has launched Gracenote Content Connect, a new ad platform that provides agencies, brands, supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-si...
05/12/2025
NEW YORK In an most important update to the workings of deal-based programmatic advertising, IAB Tech Lab has released version 1.0 of its Deals API for public c...
05/12/2025
NEW YORK Pass the turkey. Pass the stuffing. Pass the cranberry sauce. All are common requests of Americans celebrating Thanksgiving Day with family and f...
05/12/2025
NEW YORK Iris, the new cloud-connected camera control platform, has officially launched with features that turn virtually any PTZ camera into a software-connect...
05/12/2025
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. Netflix announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire the assets of Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion....
05/12/2025
NEW YORK Iris, the new cloud-connected camera control platform, has officially launched with features that turn virtually any PTZ camera into a software-connect...
05/12/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has approved AT&T's $1.02 billion acquisition of spectrum from UScellular in a decision that was issued sho...
05/12/2025
The Best Coldplay Songs: 21 Tracks That Shoot for the Stars From Yellow to Viva La Vida, Fix You to Paradise, this playlist goes back to the start.
December ...
05/12/2025
Zafris Lecture Series Brings Nabil Ayers to Berklee The 32nd annual James G. Zafris Distinguished Lecture series was held on Thursday, November 13, with guest...
05/12/2025
Back to All News
Don Lee, Lee Jin-uk, and Lalisa Manobal to Star in Netflix Act...
04/12/2025
SVG Sit-Down: ProximaVision's Claudio Lisman on Why Tethered Drones Could Be...
04/12/2025
SVG Campus Shot Callers: Imry Halevi, Senior Associate Director of Athletics, Co...
04/12/2025
Platinum White Paper: LiveU Lightweight Sports Production: A Step Change in Spor...
04/12/2025
London to Riyadh: DAZN brings the boxing glamour to new production levels for Be...
04/12/2025
Analysis: Paramount bets on the battering ram' with Champions League play By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large
Tuesday, December 2, 2025 - 10:12
Print ...
04/12/2025
Space City Home Network Launches SCHN DTC App for Astros and RocketsThe Rockets and Astros were previously the lone NBA and MLB teams without a DTC appBy Jason...
04/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Content Workflows Workshop Spotlights Evolution of Spor...
04/12/2025
New Sponsor Spotlight: Geotech's Patrick Wambold On the Unreal Engine Revolu...
04/12/2025
Curt Gowdy Jr. - Master Storyteller, Nationally and RegionallyBy Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.
Thursday, December 4, 2025 - 1:52 pm
Print This Sto...
04/12/2025
(L-R) Rebecca Lichtenfeld, Mohammadreza Eyni, Sara Khaki, and Judith Helfand att...
04/12/2025
Coronal mass ejections caused by eruptions on the surface of the sun can have fa...
04/12/2025
Gracenote Content Connect enables media ecosystem to precisely align ad campaigns and programming based on rich content signals
NEW YORK - December 4, 2025 - N...
04/12/2025
Lightware, a global specialist in AV connectivity, is looking back on a year defined by new advancements, strong collaboration and continued growth. Across the ...
04/12/2025
Riedel Communications today announced a new partnership with Haivision, a leading global provider of mission-critical, real-time video networking and visual col...
04/12/2025
Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) and Normann Engineering today announced a major milestone in their strategic collaboration, celebrating 20 successful broadband deployme...
04/12/2025
Creative software developer Foundry today announced Mari 7.5, the latest iteration of its artist-friendly paint toolset that can handle large, detailed assets w...
04/12/2025
Professional Wireless Systems (PWS), a leading provider of wireless audio solutions and RF management, was on site at Dreamforce 2025 in San Francisco providing...
04/12/2025
LTN's purpose-built IP video network brings all-movie diginet to over 100 stations and streaming platforms in just three months while eliminating satellite ...
04/12/2025
Bitmovin, the leading provider of video streaming solutions, today announced a strategic partnership with ThinkAnalytics, the global leader in AI-powered data a...
04/12/2025
The HELM, a global expert in cinematic live broadcast and high-end production workflows, has signed a partnership agreement with Keslow Camera, one of North Ame...
04/12/2025
At ISE 2026, LiveU will showcase its expanded IP-video EcoSystem, enabling broadcasters, sports, production companies and pro-AV professionals to share their st...
04/12/2025
Since the beginning of commercial television, advertising has been a key part of broadcasting. Over the years, the technology for inserting ads into programs ha...
04/12/2025
MUNICH and MILAN Warner Bros. Discovery said HBO Max is expanding into Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein on Jan. 13, 2026, and ...
04/12/2025
SAN FRANCISCO AudioShake has launched its first streaming-capable software development kits (SDKs) designed specifically for real-time music detection and copyr...
04/12/2025
NASHVILLE The mobile and REMI production company TNDV has announced that it headed south into Mexico to live-produce the three-day 2025 Zane Grey Championship P...
Reprint of an article published by the Montr al Gazette on Apr. 11, 2022
