CIBC Tower

For the office tower in Windsor, Ontario, see CIBC Building (Windsor, Ontario).

La Tour CIBC
Alternative names	Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Building
General information
Type	Commercial offices
Location	1155 Boulevard René-Lévesque Ouest Montreal, Quebec
Coordinates
Completed	1962
Owner	British Columbia Investment Management Corporation
Management	British Columbia Investment Management Corporation
Height
Antenna spire	250 m (820 ft)
Roof	187 m (614 ft)
Technical details
Floor count	45
Floor area	54,154 m2 (582,910 sq ft)
Lifts/elevators	16
Design and construction
Architect	Dickinson Ross Fish and Barret
Developer	CIBC
References

La Tour CIBC is a 187 m (614 ft) forty-five-storey skyscraper in Montreal, Quebec. With the communications antenna on the roof, the total height is 225 m (738 ft). The International Style 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, as well as 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 fire-damaged Windsor Hotel was demolished to make room for construction, with the remaining portion being converted to offices in the 1980s.

History

Completed in 1962 only a few months before Place Ville-Marie, the CIBC Tower 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 Consulate of Israel was on the 26th floor of the building and as such, it was sometimes the site of demonstrations related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The consulate has since relocated to Westmount Square in Westmount.

Architecture

The tower is exceptionally slender with only 1,400 m² (15,000 sq ft) of gross floor area per floor, because of 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, including green slate that was quarried in Wales. The building was fully renovated in 1991, and the highly visible CIBC logo at the top was redesigned in 2004 and again in 2013.

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 (23 ft) 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 184 m (604 ft), and approximately 187 m (614 ft) 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.

French-language radio station CKOI-FM transmits its 307,000 watt signal atop that building.

Tenants

• Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
• Euler Hermes
• Macquarie Group
• Russell Investments
• Stikeman Elliott LLP
• Vilaron Corporation

See also

• List of tallest buildings in Montreal
• Old Royal Bank Building, Montreal
• Molson Bank Building, Montreal
• Bank of Montreal Head Office, Montreal
• Old Canadian Bank of Commerce Building, Montreal
• Commerce Court, Toronto
• Commerce Place I and Commerce Place II

External links

• Official website