Truly bizarre how some local designers/builders continue to be so devoted with composing goofy Euro-themed historic derivatives. While actual European firms are undoubtedly world leaders in terms of cutting-edge designs that balance traditional and contemporary themes. Makes you wonder whether because it's cheaper or if these local "architects" simply have bad taste.
Then again, it isn't unique to Toronto. You'll find such modern-day "bad taste" flotsam everywhere--even alongside the "actual European firms" you speak of, to some degree. It's just that it's the wheat, not the chaff, that makes the international urban/design-related front pages.
Myself, if I may loosen my urban-design-insistence belt a little, I'm "open" to this from an urban-Voltairean standpoint, esp. if I turn off my brain cells re whatever may have existed here before; it's the humble Danforth, after all. As RRR said earlier in this thread, "this building isn't worth this much attention"--which may, paradoxically, be the best argument on its fait-accompli behalf. After all, the key to Jane Jacobs messy-vitality is a healthy spectrum of "not worth this much attention"--even if, as here, it may teeter on a fine line btw/"offensive" and "inoffensive".
But of course, that doesn't I'd endorse the FutureBuilder kind of philistine "ur just jealous" pro-argument, either. (And the struggles of a forum where the discerning Urban Shockers of yore have been displaced by what too often seem like urban/design/taste-uncompetent bozos who'd actually actively
embrace rather than merely "accept" such architecture--whether on an Old Yonge scale, a Danforth scale, or a 40-stories-at-Queen-and-Sherbourne scale--may explain why the mods seem a little trigger-friendly these days.)
