CBC Broadcast Centre

The CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto consists of 13 storeys and is located on a city block in downtown Toronto bounded by Wellington, John, Front, and Simcoe streets. Built by Eastern Construction under a Guaranteed Maximum Price (GMP) at a cost of $330 MIllion, the facility was completed in 1992 and entered into service for CBC in 1993 after an extensive technology fit-out consisting of more than 50,000 linear feet of conduit and cable tray and 1,600-km of broadcast cabling. The building measures 1,700,000 sq ft.

The facility was designed to be future-forward in all aspects with architectural, structural, and mechanical/electrical infrastructural incorporating the emergent concepts that paved the way for Digital HDTV, Digital Radio Broadcast, and IT platforms such as internet-based Multimedia Cloud services. At the time, the Broadcast Centre was considered to be the most advanced facility in the world.

The building contains three radio studios, 19 radio production studios, three television studios, two local television studios, two all purpose studios, and one national news studio. The CBC Museum is located on the first floor of the building.

The structure sits atop 3,000 massive hard-rubber pads to reduce the transmission of unwanted noise and vibrations from the surrounding exterior environment, and to this end, all studios are located in the core of the building. Operational redundancy is achieved via four 1250-kilowatt Cummins generators to provide power to critical loads. The atrium measures 10-storeys in height.

An interesting aspect of the building is the wide variety of interior finishes used to assist in radio production. For example, the Radio Drama Studio contains three types of flooring (wood, concrete, marble), two stairs (spiral and straight) with two types of treads, a functioning kitchen adjacent to a functioning shower, and a panel furnished with a number of doors of varying materials; all these elements are utilized as natural/analog sound effects to enhance radio production.