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The Florian is one of UrbanToronto's favourite condominiums, but you would not have gleaned that from our front page as of late. Why not? Well, we prefer to have a dataBase entry up for every building before we feature it on the front page, and before we publish a dataBase entry, we like to fill it with as many high quality renderings as we can get: we have standards, because we know you do to, so we don't just publish anything.
Well, it turns out that highest resolution renderings for this Diamante Development Corporation project just haven't come our way, despite our attempts to obtain them for you. Despite that, we really want to show you more of this beauty, so we are reluctanty publishing somewhat soft-focused, somewhat jaggy renderings of this otherwise terrific project. Hint: If Diamante were amenable to digging up higher quality pics, we would replace what we've got in the blink of an eye…
Meanwhile, why is it that we like this building so much that we're chucking our rendering standards out the window to bring it to you? Well, it's a combination of things. It's the curve that follows Davenport Road. It's the dark curtainwall windows that rise up the edges of various facades. It's the beguiling purple-black colour of the brick, depending on the light – – – but maybe more than anything else it's the fact that these aren't just bricks, these are precast brick panels, and they are the best we have ever seen in this town. They look so good in fact, that we are suddenly fans of precast brick panels, something we would never have believed we would be saying a year ago: they just haven't looked so good before. So, enough verbal diarrhea, let's take a look at the some photos of the construction that UrbanToronto photographers have captured so far, starting in January 2011 when the precast panels first went up.
A month and a half later, one of our members caught this rather 3D piece waiting to go up. On the following photo you will see how these projecting pieces are used for accent on the west wall.
This is from east of the building this past May. You can see framing in place for one rise of curtainwall galzing.
Glazing applied on the south side.
A neighbourly shot from the east.
The first curtainwall being applied at the southwest corner.
Marble accents along the Davenport podium frontage in July.
Curtainwall climbs the tower.
The Florian from the west with its other new neighbours, the Four Seasons siblings.
So this is what The Florian is meant to look like when finished, and as we mentioned, this is a bit low-res and soft focused… but not too bad. This rendering was created back when the building was going to be 22 storeys. After a height increase, this Young + Wright / IBI Group Architects and Hariri Pontarini Architects joint venture is now topped out at 25 storeys.
We plan to bring bring you more of this smart looking building as it nears completion over the next months, and we hope to bring you improved renderings in the dataBase entry (linked below) soon too. To join in the discussion on The Florian, or to post photos of your own of this looker, choose the Projects & Construction link below.
| Related Companies: | Arcadis, Ferris + Associates Inc., Hariri Pontarini Architects |
