Toronto Monde | 149.95m | 44s | Great Gulf | Moshe Safdie

Oops! Hope it all worked it out in the end.

Moshe Safdie gets the bum's rush
by Peter Kuitenbrouwer
National Post


The mayor's office abruptly cancelled a news conference at 1 p.m. today with Moshe Safdie, the celebrated architect, who has designed a new condo tower for the foot of Sherbourne Street. Mr. Safdie had flown in to Toronto this morning and Waterfront Toronto had invited reporters to a news conference to show off his design.

This morning at the council meeting, Councillor Pam McConnel (Toronto Centre-Rosedale) pleaded with council to approve the 36-storey, $200-million tower, called "Parkside," before Mr. Safdie's arrival: "He's a very elderly but well-renowned architect. Could we deal with it this morning?" But the speaker, Councillor Sandra Bussin (Beaches-East York) replied, "That is highly unlikely, councillor, because the mayor's priority items come first."

Mayor David Miller then went on to make a glowing speech about "The Power to Live Green -- Toronto's Sustainable Energy Strategy," which involves new city policies to harness energy and conserve electricity. By the time council approved the strategy, 33-2, council broke up for lunch.

At 1 p.m., as the press signed in for the Safdie news conference in the council's Member's Lounge, John Piper, the waterfront specialist in the mayor's office, abruptly walked to the front of the room and cancelled the event. "The item was held this morning and it's mostly my screw-up," Mr. Piper said.. "We really apologize for having screwed up. Mr. Safdie is down in the mayor's office right now making a courtesy visit. The mayor just felt it was inappropriate to hold the news conference, given that it had been held."
 
Nice to see that there is going to be some family-sized units in this interesting looking development.
 
Nice to see that there is going to be some family-sized units in this interesting looking development.

SOME family units. By SOME you mean 5%. HALF of what Adam Vaughn is setting for as a standard across downtown for all developers. You would think that WT, which claims it is creating an alternative to urban sprawl would go higher than the proposed law. What exactly is 5%? When being compared to other condos, one finds that there might be around 600-700 units in Parkside. That's around 30 units, which means a mere 30 families, in a building with more than a thousand residents! if WT wants its communities to replace suburbs, they must imitate them, at least demographically. Although its true that the percentage of the pop. in the building made up by family members will be quite a bit be higher than 5%, its not going to come close to the over 90% of households, the same number for many of the suburban communities that have been built in the last decade or two. I'm not saying that 90% is the solution, far from it since the lack of mixed incomes and households types in the burbs is the reason for the lack of families, low incomes and hollowing out of many of NA's cities and we don't want this to happen to the suburbs (i'm sure many UTers feel otherwise). But, mixed use is also not 5% family households, even 10% if you consider single parent families,and 90% non-family households.
 
It is interesting looking. I like the stairway effect! As said previously, it could look really cool if the "stairs" revolved around the entire building on all sides.
 
I'm a big fan of Safdie's idea for stepped gardens on each residential floor. They will create some of the most interesting indoor spaces in the city (too bad those spaces are going to be private property). I think Moshe is trying to bring back a Habitat '67 theme into this building.

Unfortunately I don't know how well this building would look from far away, against the skyline. I think it would look like a twin (or triplet?) of the West Harbour City towers on the skyline.
 
SHOCKERSPAM!

mahler4_tower_vinoly_raoulsuermondt.jpg


So much green grass too!


Safdie's Design:

1386


1387


1388


1384


1383


1382
 
Last edited:
wouldn't investors take this "affordable pricing for families" as a opportunity to buy?

can they actually do some kind of screening to ensure that people buying are the people that the city intended to sell to?
 
SHOCKERSPAM!

mahler4_tower_vinoly_raoulsuermondt.jpg


So much green grass too!

Amsterdam's suburbs have been quite the place for good architecture recently. Definitely one of my top office designs of the past decade.

I think Safdie has proven that he's still got game. I'm not even a PoMo fan, but this tower knocks my socks off. It's just composed to a different level.
 
Condos with ground floor retail, just what we need more of.
 

Back
Top