Marble Falls In Toronto

TORONTO – All of the 24,000 marble slabs now cladding the 72-story First Canadian Place skyscraper will be inspected after one of them fell 51 stories during an afternoon thunderstorm on May 15.
The 308-pound Italian white marble slab dropped from the 54th-floor level of Canada’s tallest skyscraper, landing on the third-story roof of the building’s podium. The cause of the failure was unknown at Stone Business presstime.
Canadian television network CTV reported that a tile-replacement program was in progress when Brookfield Properties, the building’s current owner, took possession 18 months ago. Brookfield had an ongoing maintenance program for the cladding at the time of the failure, which a Toronto city official described as, “an anomaly.”
The marble cladding went on the building at the direction of U.S. architect Edward Durrell Stone, who served as a design consultant during construction in 1975. The Toronto Star noted that cladding efforts were delayed 32 years ago when builders received a large shipment of the wrong color of marble.
Ironically, Stone was also the architect of the Standard Oil Building (now Aon Center) in Chicago. The 83-story skyscraper, when finished in 1972, was the world’s tallest marble-clad building; however, failure of the stone in Chicago’s lakefront climate led to a total recladding in North Carolina granite in the early 1990s.