CREDIT: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun Architects Walter Francl (left) and Nigel Dancy, with a model of what will be Vancouver’s greenest tall building.

Vancouver is already a front-runner in North America‘s green-tower movement.

But a unique new downtown project planned by one of the world’s leading architectural firms is about to raise the level a notch.

The proposed design for the 37-storey tower unveiled to a select group this week by architect Nigel Dancey from

London-based Foster & Partners — famous for its British Museum and Berlin Reichstag re-designs — shows a building aerodynamically shaped to take advantage of local winds for natural ventilation and angled to get the maximum heating and cooling help from sun and shade.

It will generate its own power from a plant in the building that will produce cheaper and cleaner power than the region’s grid.

And it will incorporate the city’s first water-recycling system in a residential building by capturing rainwater on the roof and distributing it, and by filtering and re-using the water from sinks to toilets.

“That’s fairly innovative,” says Vancouver‘s recently created green-buildings planner, Dale Mikkelsen. “That move alone will cut down water consumption by 35 per cent.”

And, of course, the 800-block West Hastings project will have gardens and greenery, both horizontally on roofs and vertically on balconies, multiple use that fosters energy conservation, and recycled materials that other Vancouver green-tower-building pioneers have incorporated into their designs in what is becoming a growing green movement.

The pioneer green tower in Vancouver is the Wall Centre, built in the late ’90s, where green-building advocate and architect Peter Busby teamed up with developer Peter Wall in the first major city project that tackled the challenge of marrying green ideas to the tower form.

Although the tower didn’t achieve the green standard it had originally aimed for, it set precedents and is still the only building in Vancouver with triple-glazed windows, reducing its energy consumption considerably.

Architect James Cheng,