Toronto Picasso Condos | 128.62m | 39s | Mattamy Homes | Teeple Architects

This is so refreshing for Toronto. Bring it on!

Habitat was influential but unique - as a model it didn't catch on. This is a stylistic retread, stacked vertically. How is it "moving the art forward" as Teeple claims?

The use of the term modular promises much - but what will it actually mean, in practice? Many apartment buildings are modular, built with similar-sized units for reasons of economy. Is this one structually different? Will the apartments be prefabricated? Will owners be able to rearrange interior walls or buy up adjacent apartments and combine them? Other than making it easy to point out your apartment from the street below, how is this modularity of any consequence? Mostly, like Habitat, it seems to be a reaction against the sleek Modernist tower model that Mays identifies; but in attempting to create a "sense of house" it stacks typical single family Modernist homes of the sort that Teeple and others are already building locally. Habitat has exterior walkways - an attemt to create a sense of community - but will this thing? It strikes me as mostly cosmetic rather than doing anything new.

Interesting take Shocker...

I agree. The terms 'prefabricated' and 'modular' are thrown around with much cavaleer these days. What substance lies behind the rhetoric?

It seems to me that the kind of tales Teeple and others spin are simply another form of covert marketspeek. A secret language spoken by those who wish to pass off rehashed ideas as new and novel concepts.

Safdie's Habitat was truly a challenge to the existing paradigm. Is this? Probably not, but all the same, do I like it? Without a doubt.

Though when it comes to vertical-stacking gimmickery, maybe anything from Paul Rudolph to Bertrand Goldberg might make for better 60s invocations...

^ or Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower:

wyliepoon said:

^ or Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower:

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Amazing exterior. Not aging too well though.
That interior shot. Really?!?
I can almost hear the original theme to Star Trek. Is there such a term as 'retro-futuristic'?

The room was small enough that heat was provided by the stereo and television components.

The interior of that building looks like a cabin on a ferry or cruise ship, besides the style of the design of course.

Ahhhh Metabolism...Granny's right though, the poor thing really hasn't aged that well.

It will age even more poorly moving forward: from what I understand, it is slated for demolition.

Actually, it looks like stacked washing machines - really dirty washing machines.

Top, A rendering of the Gansevoort condo/hotel planned for Richmond Street by Toronto architect Stephen Teeple. (HERZOG & DE MEURON / TEEPLE ARCHITECTS)

Bottom, The crown of Herzog & de Meuron’s tower, 56 Leonard St. in New York. Penthouses occupy full-floor glass boxes that have the effect of being staggered and shifted atop one another.

How Teeple's tower stacks up

A revolutionary Toronto tower design goes head-to-head with a deluxe New York project from Bird's Nest architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron

JOHN BENTLEY MAYS

From Friday's Globe and Mail
October 31, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT

A couple of weeks ago, I reported in this column on an intriguing new Toronto boutique hotel/condominium tower called Gansevoort. Designed by architect Stephen Teeple, the 36-storey project is a brusque artistic departure from the common run of new tall buildings we've been seeing around town during latest real estate boom.

It's neither a shiny modernist glass plinth, that is, nor a pastiche of yesteryear's deluxe apartment-block styles. Instead, Mr. Teeple has cast his building as a jaunty, jagged stack of horizontal chunks that tuck in and jut out as the structure rises, creating numerous terraces planted with full-sized trees.

If the architect's renderings are anything to go on, Gansevoort will be look-at-me architecture in the best sense: urbane, muscular and chic, and forcefully argumentative vis-à-vis the more timid recent residential projects in its downtown neighbourhood.

A short while after the Gansevoort column appeared, I received a press kit about a proposed tall building in lower Manhattan's Tribeca district named, after its address, 56 Leonard. The publicist's note that came along with the package suggested that, if I found Gansevoort interesting, I should definitely take a look at 56 Leonard. He was right.

Though each building apparently took shape in complete ignorance of the other — Mr. Teeple told me he knew nothing about 56 Leonard until long after his Gansevoort scheme was finished — the two towers come to similarly novel conclusions about how tall buildings should meet the sky.

The New York tower is the handiwork of Swiss architectural stars Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, whose recent work includes what's probably the most televised new building project in the world, the Beijing Olympics' Bird's Nest stadium.

Their condominium is deluxe: Prices for two-bedroom apartments start at about $4-million (U.S.), while the four-bedroom units range from about $6.5-million to some $12-million. For the very well-heeled, there will be a 5,000-square-foot penthouse priced at $25-million.

The shaft starts off at sidewalk level and rises for a couple of dozen storeys as a conventional glass tower on a sturdy base. The drama begins toward the top, which Mr. Herzog and Mr. de Meuron have broken up into cantilevered volumes pulling back and jutting outward.

Critics of this project have noted that this dashing arrangement is perhaps meant to evoke a number of glass-walled, modernist single-family residential slabs — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's famous flat-topped Farnsworth House is mentioned — stacked up helter-skelter in the sky. The comparison is apt, and 56 Leonard's effect on the skyline, like that of Gansevoort, is fresh and pleasing.

But apart from this formal similarity at their summits, the designs of 56 Leonard and Gansevoort are quite different, in both inspiration and result.

The New York building is basically a glass tower topped off in a striking manner. But there, its novelty stops. All the suites, from bottom to penthouses, for example, are glazed floor to ceiling in the classic modernist residential style. This deployment of a heat-wasting glass skin immediately dates the project, inasmuch as it speaks of a time when energy was dead cheap and wonderfully plentiful — a time we clearly live in no longer.

The project also perpetuates the traditional urban role of the sleek, neat glass tower as a critique of the untidy tumble and dirt of the city.

In crafting the facades of Gansevoort, by way of contrast, Mr. Teeple has rejected the all-glass aesthetic that has dominated advanced tall-building design for the past half-century, and set in place surfaces — only 50 per cent glazed — meant to make Gansevoort thrifty in its consumption of energy.

The structure's largely opaque cladding also serves the artistic purpose of deliberately linking the building to the hard, opaque surfaces of the city — its sidewalks and roadways and gritty laneways. The trees that constitute Gansevoort's vertical park similarly evoke our tough urban forest, flourishing (like the city's human inhabitants) despite car fumes, road salt and other harsh conditions.

While 56 Leonard presses forward the old modernist agenda of making shiny tall buildings that stand aloof from the city, the Gansevoort aesthetic nestles the building down into the urban fabric of downtown Toronto.

It should be clear by now which of these two buildings, in my view, is more in touch and in tune with the rhythms and best thinking in the contemporary North American city. In Gansevoort's bold styling, we are seeing the end of the glass curtain wall as standard cladding for tall buildings, and the beginning of a new tower design inspiration, in sync with the most urgent ecological and urban concerns of the present moment.

A well written piece with some decent insight and opinions.

What a ridiculous article by John Bentley Mays. FIRSTLY a Condo proposed in New York is not in competition with a Condo proposed for Toronto so why the side-by-side comparison? SECONDLY he concludes that the Toronto Tower is superior because it is “only 50 per cent glazed” therefore it is more energy efficient. If you can afford to spend 25 Million US$ for the 5000 SF New York Tower Penthouse are you really concerned about your energy bill?? THIRDLY just look at the renderings. If built in the same city the New York Tower would win hands down.

Peepers said:

What a ridiculous article by John Bentley Mays. FIRSTLY a Condo proposed in New York is not in competition with a Condo proposed for Toronto so why the side-by-side comparison? SECONDLY he concludes that the Toronto Tower is superior because it is “only 50 per cent glazed†therefore it is more energy efficient. Now..if you can spend 25 Million US$ for the 5000 SF New York Tower Penthouse are you really concerned about your energy bill?? THIRDLY just look at the renderings. If built in the same city the New York Tower would win hands down.

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The comparison wasn't inappropriate given the similar look of the buildings. The point on energy efficiency is salient because of concerns over the environment which have become prominent in today's society. These interesting designs could be trend setters for cheaper condos, after all. Finally, the Toronto tower's rendering is cheaper and one will have to wait for the final result before jumping to conclusions.