Well, I am not expecting to convince anyone necessarily, but while I always thought the podium was awful (it made little Phipps Street feel like the back of the back of beyond, and was of no note on Wellesley either) I always liked the tower. On the east and west facades there are the I-beam (I-beams only make sense when you mentally picture the serifs) concrete parapet walls below the runs of windows on each floor. Those simple yet detailed concrete strips gave real texture to the facade on a sunny days as they would give you a strip of increasing or decreasing shadow below the windows, while when combined with the corduroy-style roughly ridged concrete on the north and south facades firmly rooted the building in the brutalist idiom of the 60s (and in fact this was a WZMH Architects design, completed in 1967).
I love that corduroy look. We lost it on Old Mill Towers a couple of years ago, and now we are losing here. Is there any left in Toronto? (Beside the Old Mill Towers lobby? Such great texture…)
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One Bloor
