Story at a glance:
- Amazon’s new 43,000-square-foot workspace transforms a former Vancouver post office.
- Adaptively reusing the enormous building is a sustainable success and saved the project both in carbon and waste sent to landfill.
In downtown Vancouver, one of Canada’s most ambitious heritage redevelopments continues to unfold. The Post, a former Canada Post regional processing facility that opened in 1958, has been transformed into a bustling mixed-use development that spans an entire city block and now houses Amazon.
Originally designed by McCarter, Nairne & Partners, the building has long been a local icon of post-war International-style architecture: a rectilinear concrete volume floating above a gently recessed ground-level entry. At the time of construction it was the largest building in Vancouver, and the largest welded streel structure on earth. However, due to increasing automation and technological changes that reshaped postal operations, the facility was decommissioned in the 1980s. Canada Post eventually vacated the building before selling it in 2013.
The ensuing redevelopment, led by QuadReal Property Group with architecture by MCM Architects, is the most significant heritage redevelopment in provincial history. With new 21- and 22-story towers now emerging from the podium, the complex combines 185,000 square feet of retail with 1.1 million square feet of commercial office space. A new public plaza has brought renewed vitality to street level. A once underused asset is now a well-defined, lively urban campus.
The environmental benefits of adaptively reusing a building of such scale are undeniable. By preserving and renovating the podium, the design and development team saved an estimated 25,000 tonnes of carbon and diverted a staggering amount of waste from landfill.
The Post’s reuse was simplified by the fact that it has good bones—its welded-steel frame is particularly accommodating of large, flexible floorplans. Today Amazon is The Post’s sole corporate tenant, leasing all 1.1 million square feet across the podium and both towers. (The South Tower is completed and occupied, with the North Tower set to join in 2026.)
How We Did It
Photo by Seth Stevenson
Photo by Seth Stevenson
B+H Architects led the interior design of Amazon’s spaces within The Post, including both office towers, the entry lobby, and a multi-level atrium. The latter, housed inside (and on top) of the historic podium, functions as the connective tissue between the towers. An open-plan and light-filled communal hub for staff, it houses a café, a 200-person event venue, breakout areas, meeting rooms, and even a roof-deck dog run and basketball courts. It’s a place to meet, mingle, and collaborate, and a home for chance interactions and internal community building.
While The Post’s unique scale offered Amazon an incredible opportunity to fit the space to their needs, it also presented a distinct set of creative and technical interior design constraints. Unlike the site’s towers, which are purpose-built to house offices, the podium was originally designed for different use.
Natural daylighting is fundamental to a healthy workplace and was a key consideration for The Post’s revival. This required addressing two factors: the exceptionally large floorplate and the small, punched windows in the historic concrete facade—a contrast to the large glass curtain walls wrapping the adjacent towers. In response MCM Architects stacked an eighth level, encased by 22-foot-high glass curtain walls and perimeter skylights, onto the podium. Newly inserted light wells and a connecting central stair carry light downward into the building core, all without disrupting the historic facade.
For the interiors team at B+H, strategic programming was critical for maximizing daylighting. Open offices and workspaces are located against windows, while programs that require privacy or quiet are organized in bands perpendicular to the building’s perimeter. This orientation maximizes the amount of natural daylighting that penetrates the building’s core.
Details in Demand
Photo by Seth Stevenson
As people return to offices there has been an increased demand for spaces that feel more home-like rather than corporate. A very intentional decision was made to create inviting, cozy breakout and meeting spaces through fabric selection, lighting, and floorplan layout.
Establishing approachable, human-scaled spaces was another priority. While the atrium often enjoys the benefits of large open volumes and the visual drama of double-height ceilings, it was paramount that it also contains opportunities for quiet conversation or heads-down work. As a result podium floorplans are divided into human-scaled pods. Other strategies—like establishing single-story datum lines, introducing nook-like furniture, and, in the café, designing a series of wooden canopies—help manage vertical scale at key moments. This balance of open and contained spaces responds to individual preferences and the beats of a workday.
Similar attention was paid to acoustics, exemplified by the atrium’s grab-and-go café. Local building code required that the café’s entire mechanical mezzanine be housed within the double-height space. This posed an important question: How could we contain the drone of mechanical equipment? Intensive collaboration and full-scale design workshops with the entire team, including acoustic experts BKL, led to a solution—mechanical equipment was kept as low to the slab as possible, while thoughtfully integrated (and barely noticeable) acoustical curtains and perforated screens dampen noise. That we exceeded our acoustical testing targets is among the building’s foremost interior accomplishments. A space that could have been echoey or industrial is warm and welcoming—and a place to linger.
Overcoming Challenges
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- Photo by Seth Stevenson
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- Photo by Seth Stevenson
The Post’s scale ¬presented another challenge—designing a cohesive identity across the block-sized complex without repetition. For this we turned to the building’s history as a recurring and malleable source of inspiration. B+H’s integrated EGD team designed perhaps the most memorable of such references; lining a café wall, thousands of historic reclaimed mailboxes form an 18-foot tall, pixelated postage stamp of Vancouver Harbour. As an interactive element, one of these reclaimed mailboxes opens to reveal a historic postage stamp.
Other interior features are more abstracted. Lobby benches echo the perforated edges of a postal stamp. Ceiling arches in elevator bays reference the form of a 2,400-foot underground tunnel—now filled in—that once carried mail to a nearby rail station. Each elevator bay also features reclaimed mail chutes that have been modernized with LED lighting panels. They display blue lights that adjust in intensity throughout the day, mimicking the activity of a mailroom. The workspace corridors in the office towers also feature EGD installations designed to reflect the cultural landscape of Vancouver and the building’s heritage.
A Success Story
Photo by Seth Stevenson
It goes without saying that adaptive reuse is essential in the context of environmental crisis. As architects and interior designers, our work is increasingly driven by our ability to respond to the constraints of historic and existing buildings. It’s our responsibility that what’s left inside are healthy, social, and successful spaces.
The Post achieves this all remarkably well. It preserves a piece of Vancouver history and eliminates unnecessary carbon emissions associated with demolition and new construction—but not at the expense of a modern workplace that prioritizes employee health and wellness, or social connection and collaboration. Its success is the result of a design and development process where all project partners collectively addressed the building’s imperfections and underlined its many charms.
