The World Exchange Plaza is an office / retail building in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It covers an entire city block between Metcalfe and O'Connor south of Queen Street. The first phase of the project was completed in 1991. The twenty-storey building was unusual in Ottawa for its visual flair. The eastern side was marked by a large plaza modeled after the Roman Coliseum. The building opened in the middle of a deep recession and initially had trouble being filled. The 1990s boom solved this and work began on a second tower, which was completed in 2001. This second tower greatly increased the available office space, but also made the structure far less visually arresting.
The two towers hold offices for a variety of companies, including Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Borden Ladner Gervais (BLG), CTV, The Manning Centre for Building Democracy, Microsoft, Accenture, Telus, EDS, Ogilvy Renault, RBC Dominion Securities, TD Canada Trust, MTS Allstream, and CPAC. Atop of one tower is the TD logo and atop the other is the BLG logo.
The World Exchange Plaza shopping mall is located in the base of the structure. It is home to a number of stores and an Empire Theatres movie theatre, one of only two cinema complexes in the downtown core. The mall is also noted for the life size models of narwhals and belugas that hang from the ceiling.
The complex is currently owned by Bentall Kennedy.
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or exchange:
“As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)