Tour CIBC
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- For the office tower in Windsor, Ontario, see CIBC Building (Windsor, Ontario)
La Tour CIBC (CIBC Building) is a skyscraper in the city of Montreal. It measures 187 m (613 ft) in height and counts forty-five stories. Couting the pinnacle the building would be 250 m (820 ft) high. The 45-floor office tower was built by Peter Dickinson, Ross, Fish, Duschenes and Barrett and was the city's tallest building from 1962 to 1963. The building holds offices for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the corporate law firm Stikeman Elliott and numerous other businesses.
The building is located at 1155 René Lévesque Boulevard West next to Dorchester Square facing the imposing but dwarfed Sun Life Building. Part of the historic Windsor Hotel was demolished to make room for construction, with the remaining portion being converted to offices in the 1980s.
Completed in 1962 only a few months before Place Ville-Marie, the CIBC Building was the tallest building in Canada and the entire Commonwealth of Nations when it was first built, until being surpassed later that year by Place Ville-Marie where a penthouse was added by the competing Royal Bank for that express purpose.
The tower is exceptionally slender (1,400 square metres of gross floor area per floor), due to a zoning regulation limiting the total building floor area to twelve times the property area. Its façade is more ornamental than that of the average International style tower, with horizontal strips of glass curtain wall alternating with spandrels of various types of stone. The building was fully renovated in 1991, and the highly visible CIBC logo at the top was redesigned in 2004.
Inside, levels 15 and 29 are transfer floors; level 16 is a triple-height mechanical floor that is skipped in the floor numbering of the passenger elevators. Levels 42-44 are also mechanical floors; level 45 was originally an indoor observation deck but was closed in the 1970s. The top 7 m of the tower are actually an open-air raised partition, built sometime after construction, that hides the rooftop elevator control rooms. Without this extra structure, the actual roof height is 180 m, and approximately 184 m when counting the elevator penthouse. It is the fifth tallest building in Montreal, but an antenna raises the total height to 250 m (820 ft), the tallest pinnacle in Montreal.
The Consulate of Israel is on the 26th floor on the building and as such, it is sometimes the site of demonstrations related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each Friday during the summer, a small group of anti-Israel supporters gathers on the tower side, facing off a small group of pro-Israel supporters on the Dorchester Square side. The "micro-demonstrations" are generally peaceful and last only during lunchtime.
The doors on this building are most dysfunctional. They are offset hinged and most difficult to move.
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[edit] See also
- List of Montreal's 10 tallest skyscrapers
- Old Royal Bank Building, Montreal
- Molson Bank Building, Montreal
- Bank of Montreal Head Office, Montreal
- Old Canadian Bank of Commerce Building, Montreal
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