Haha! Many of those things you listed can also be seen as positives. Others don't apply because, that's right! The place isn't finished yet. Basically the whole list is a matter of opinion.
The place isn't meant to be scrutinized as an architectural gem. So statements like "Windows don't line up, Ad frames don't line up" makes me laugh. The place is supposed to be loud and fun. And to that end, it achieved its goal.
But hey, whatever makes you look cool and smart!
I know, I know... it's not a bug, it's a feature!
Let me try to take Grey's deficiency list from another perspective:
- Somehow manages to be enormous on the outside yet claustrophobic on the inside. Kind of a reverse-TARDIS.
- For all its size, the interior provides no sense of vista, sightline, or ceremonial space. What vistas there are have the unpleasant habit of ending in fireproof insulation. To see how this can be done well, even in the service of dreary chain outlets, cross the road to the Eaton Centre. Or go down to the Paramount. Or up to Yorkdale.
- Pedestrian circulation is confusing and constricted. Wayfinding isn't intuitive. In crowd situations - narrow escalators over an open atrium, sprinklers within arms reach - it might even be dangerous.
- Natural lighting is almost nil.
- The theatre lobby manages to look cheap without being inexpensive, unlike, say, the Rainbow theatres, which at least are both (and has a piano on which people can play the theme from Top Gun over and over).
- Presents a wall of advertising to Dundas Square, with a tiny little entrance that's too diminuative and dark to entice the crowds over, which might be just as well given what's inside.
- Has no presence or coherence as a building. You could argue that this is a marriage of form and function in which the bride and groom are so wretched, they at least deserve each other. But a building's form has obligations to the city around it, too. A building of that scale needs to announce and explain itself coherently, even if it's speaking in a foreign language. It needs to explain to the city what it does and what's inside. Even a surly brutalist slab provides answers to these questions (even if the answer is "Fuck off").
Toronto Life Square, on the other hand, has no coherence at all. It has corporate logos plastered all over the place. But what to make of it? How are we to know that the little Shopper's Drug Mart badge pasted on the second floor refers to a shop hidden in the sub-basement, and not just another ad? Or that the AMC theatres with the sign above the front door leads to cinemas up a bewildering flight of escalators, through a food court? The problem here is that there's no relationship between the building's outside and its inside, so all the labelling on the outside is incoherent and arbitrary. The doors are dwarfed and unheralded; it's not even immediately clear how one is supposed to get into this thing to get to the store one wants.
- Also: Crushing in mind and spirit
- Fits almost any definition of ugliness that could be agreed upon
- A source of visual and psychic pollution
- The very incarnation of joylessness
- Fake fans on the outside.
What was there before? Well, before the blue hoarding, there was a stretch of stores that happily filled up a stretch of Yonge with its trademark semi-seediness. I'm not married to semi-seediness. But I'd take it over this.
And, my friends, this building is done. Finished as it's going to be. Done like dinner. Pining for the fjords. This is an ex-project.
Now. Seriously. About that Grey Poupon.
