City rant #1: Toronto the unfinished

[AlchemisTO]

Why don't construction crews ever *finish* a project in Toronto? To give you an example, I was down at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art the other day. The project is beautifully designed, and the building is a very thoughtful addition to Queen's Park Ave. but, lo and behold, the construction workers have failed to sealed the concrete steps and there are foam inserts waiting for something like a streetlamp to come in - eventually. Down the road, the Four Seasons Opera House entrance has been obscured by the Skyjack for I don't know how long, and everytime roadwork is "completed", the crews leave a mess of pylons and sandbags behind, forcing traffic to squeeze through a "construction zone" for months after the project should have been done. Why?

 

[building babel]

Have patience.

Westminster Abbey was begun around 1045. After demolitions, changes, and additions, it was completed in the 1740's - when Nicholas Hawksmoor's two western towers were added.

 

[TdotTrickyRicky]

Anyone familiar with contractors, from the smallest to the biggest projects knows that this phenomenon is almost universal. There are several reasons for this, financial and psychological and various contractual clauses largely uneffective in practice to attempt to stop it. It is a rare event when both client and contractor come away completely satisfied with a project completion, even if the relationship for the previous 95 percent is cordial. Ask anyone you know who has had a reno or home addition.

 

[The Burgher of TO]

architects are as much to blame as the contractors. you'd be surprised how often they leave little details off of their prints, things like flashing and caulking and grout. i walk by the ballet school all the time and always notice a missing bit of flashing on the south side, but i also read the prints for that wall and know that they never called for anything to be put there.

incidentally, you'd also be surprised how often large things are omitted or neglected. tho most times the subcontractor will catch that sort of thing and a revision will be done

 

[andreapalladio]

Actually, the Abbey remains unfinished. Wren and Hawksmoor planned a central tower over the theatre of the abbey (the crossing in every other church) which has yet to be built.

 

[building babel]

I didn't know that. There can't be many buildings that combine both Gothic and Gothic Revival elements. It was only a few years ago that they added stone sculptures of modern day martyrs in the niches above the west door, so work continues.

 

[andreapalladio]

Actually, if you look at the towers closely, they are an odd mishmash of classical and gothic elements, yet seem to work very well.

 

[building babel]

I suppose, working when he did, he would have found it difficult to avoid classical references even when "finishing" a Gothic church like Westminster. But he took bits of Gothic and bits of Classical and mixed them up in his other buildings too, inside and out, so maybe creating his own unique style through pastiche was his strength.

 

[andreapalladio]

That's why there are those false curtain walls at St. Pauls - to hide the buttresses that support the nave.

 

[building babel]

So much subterfuge in building that place - work going on behind huge screens so the clergy wouldn't see how Wren was changing the design they had approved, and the absurd spire left off completely!

 

[andreapalladio]

But excellent contract drafting - allowing him to change anything not essential, which Wren interpreted as pretty much everything!

 

[building babel]

And, presumably, an enlightened client - the King - who enabled it to happen.

 

[andreapalladio]

And not to mention the best possible way to experiment with design ideas - all those London parish churches that he designed while working on St. Pauls.

 

[nstuch]

i couldn't agree more.. yesterday i walked past the corner of Lakeshore and Coxwell where the city is "building" a skateboard park; it was quickly turned into a big mound of dirt months ago and all summer has sat there sprouting weeds with not a piece of construction equipment in sight. in the same area, the supposed refurbishment of Leslie south of Lakeshore looks craptacular in its execution.

 

[building babel]

A bit like Gaudi, who designed all those other buildings while work continued on the Sagrada Familia.

Our "I want it now" culture might have mystified Mediaeval stonemasons - who knew that neither they nor their grandchildren would live to see the great buildings they worked on completed.