Toronto Corus Quay | ?m | 8s | Waterfront Toronto | Diamond Schmitt

"Toronto is a great city, but it's an ugly city"

yes, thats generally how I feel about it. For whatever reason we didnt have (m)any visionary city builders through much of our history. So much is just a mishmash of different styles and eras mixed with neglect and poor planning... sometimes I feel that it cant be fixed. Somehow we seem to lack the sense of civic pride that I see in other cities when I travel. So often it seems that we choose the easiest and cheapest solution. The idea that only bland boxes can be functional is a weak argument imo... if that were strictly the case all these other countries and cities wouldnt be able to support such levels of experimentation in their architecture.

I do like how the waterfront revitalization plans look on paper but can they pull it off in real life and make this area as vital and vibrant as the drawings? I'm in no rush to get old, but it will be interesting to see what has been accomplished in 20 years from now.
 
Riverdale Rink Rat said:
And people are saying beyond goofy things like it 'physically hurts' that the first office building looks like a well-planned, well-built office building. It's the hysterical tone and antics that drive me nuts.
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Has no one heard of hyperbole? Seriously? I'm being criticized for this? Wow! Methinks some people take it waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more seriously than I! haha
 
Oh, stop. And a comment for un2 & others on QQT

simuls said:
Has no one heard of hyperbole? Seriously? I'm being criticized for this? Wow! Methinks some people take it waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more seriously than I! haha
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I was the one who said you were hyperbolic. You can't switch gears now and say, "Well, I was being ironically hyperbolic."

There's a huge difference between the inside retail portion of QQT and the newly fun and recreational outside of QQT. How do we solve the dead areas inside QQT when we build Corus Quay? How about we build it as an, I don't know, office building. That way, people will have a reason to populate it during the day and tons of people will hit the boardwalk for an after work stroll in the summer.

I'm not going to defend Harbour Square in any way. It's big and ugly. That's why it's important that Waterfront Toronto seems to have learned from that 25-years-ago-now stab at recreating the Waterfront, with Pier 27 and Corus Quay both specifically designed to give the public fabulous access to the harbour.

Finally -- what kind of restaurants or bars are you expecting in a touristy/recreational area? The Bovine Sex Club? A huge whacking dance warehouse? The Guvernment? (Oh, wait...) A place for a pint on a big deck seems like just about the appropriate thing to have on a boardwalk, no?
 
Riverdale Rink Rat said:
what kind of restaurants or bars are you expecting in a touristy/recreational area? The Bovine Sex Club? A huge whacking dance warehouse? The Guvernment? (Oh, wait...) A place for a pint on a big deck seems like just about the appropriate thing to have on a boardwalk, no?
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All kinds of cafes, bars, lounges, restaurants and maybe even clubs are expected and wanted on the water's edge. Just need to travel to a handful of other waterfront cities and you will see just how vibrant and diverse the social scene is (while still catering to local and tourist interest).

In Croatia, for example, you have two very different places in Hvar and Split. They are each waterfront towns with long, pedestrian friendly boardwalks. Each are completely lined with a mix of entertainment venue, whether it is your standard pub or family owned restaurant or hot-spot night club. Toronto would be infinitely better with half of what these two small towns have to offer on their waterfronts.

In Victoria BC, for example, you have an enitre harbourfront crammed with historic buildings, newer mid-rise structures and small streets. There is a diverse waterfront and with many restaurants, pubs, and clubs dotting the waterfront or just a step away off a side street. It doesn't have to be a continuous path of patios and base-music to be a party scene.

Hell, look at Burlington just down the lake. This city should not have a nicer waterfront than Toronto but it does. And it also has more entertainment options then the entire Queen's Quay ranging from lakeside patios, lake side bistros, fine dining, coffee shops and desert shops, "ethnic" food (aka waterdown suburbian version of pad thai) and a few bars for nighttime. I'm not saying it is perfect but it does a great job of attracting locals and tourists to the lake for a variety of uses.

Above are three modest examples. Toronto is in a whole other league compard to the four cities/towns listed above. Yes it deserves something iconic. Yes it deserves something that generates traffic (foot traffic, not cars). And yes, it deserves something that caters to locals and tourists alike. The formula isn't rocket science and we shouldn't have to settle for any less than what Toronto deserves.
 
Urban Shocker said:
Grey is the most versatile colour because it contains all others - UN studio used a silver grey to unifying effect on the exterior public face of their La Defense Offices, Almere, Netherlands for instance - which p5 posted images of earlier on this thread. Piano's Chicago addition is all neutrals, as is the ICA in Boston. They're both art institutions, on other sites, in other cities, for other clients, with other requirements, and neither are models for what Corus has to look like, or be like, any more than the other buildings that get plucked from the electronic ether now and then by fanboys like you and held up as examples of what we should be building on such-and-such a site are.
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And here we go again. Buildings can't be compared because of such-and-such a reason. I posted a picture of Renzo's new ceiling because it is simply beautiful - similar in a way to how Jacky Boy Wonder's should have turned out according to the preliminary renders. The roof we've actually been shouldered with however, is a heavy, clumsy, prefabricated affair, something I expected those with 'educated eyes' would have immediately noticed. At no point did I or anyone else suggest that the buildings posted should be 'models' per say, but merely that more talented architects are doing far better work elsewhere.
 
CSW2424 said:
All kinds of cafes, bars, lounges, restaurants and maybe even clubs are expected and wanted on the water's edge. Just need to travel to a handful of other waterfront cities and you will see just how vibrant and diverse the social scene is (while still catering to local and tourist interest).

In Croatia, for example, you have two very different places in Hvar and Split. They are each waterfront towns with long, pedestrian friendly boardwalks. Each are completely lined with a mix of entertainment venue, whether it is your standard pub or family owned restaurant or hot-spot night club. Toronto would be infinitely better with half of what these two small towns have to offer on their waterfronts.

In Victoria BC, for example, you have an enitre harbourfront crammed with historic buildings, newer mid-rise structures and small streets. There is a diverse waterfront and with many restaurants, pubs, and clubs dotting the waterfront or just a step away off a side street. It doesn't have to be a continuous path of patios and base-music to be a party scene.

Hell, look at Burlington just down the lake. This city should not have a nicer waterfront than Toronto but it does. And it also has more entertainment options then the entire Queen's Quay ranging from lakeside patios, lake side bistros, fine dining, coffee shops and desert shops, "ethnic" food (aka waterdown suburbian version of pad thai) and a few bars for nighttime. I'm not saying it is perfect but it does a great job of attracting locals and tourists to the lake for a variety of uses.

Above are three modest examples. Toronto is in a whole other league compard to the four cities/towns listed above. Yes it deserves something iconic. Yes it deserves something that generates traffic (foot traffic, not cars). And yes, it deserves something that caters to locals and tourists alike. The formula isn't rocket science and we shouldn't have to settle for any less than what Toronto deserves.
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Do you even visit the waterfront?

There is plenty of foot traffic as it is. All of the bars and restaurants on the waters edge are always packed. The waterfront already caters to a variety of uses, and adding office space to the mix will only make it more dynamic.

What our waterfront needs is something that ties it all together. The news Queens Quay will be that thing.

Burlington's waterfront, while pretty... can barely compete with Toronto's in todays form, let alone the future.
 
I tend to agree more with CSW's observations. It just seems that other cities have a higher concentration of eating and drinking establishments, more well integrated with whatever residential or commercial type buildings may be present. There are some decent spots at Harbourfront, but as we know, east of Yonge street has been pretty much a no go zone up until now and west of say Simcoe or Rees Street you'd be hard pressed to find anything in the bases of those residential buildings other than some dry cleaners. The north side of Queen's Quay in between there has what, a Pizza Pizza and a Subway or something like that. The best thing we have right now is Queen's Quay Terminal and Pier 4. Just think of San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf... there is a dense congregation of restaurants of all types and price ranges, 67 of them according to this: http://sanfrancisco.menupages.com/restaurants/all-areas/fishermans-wharf/all-cuisines/
perhaps its the seasonal aspect of the Harbourfront that is a limiting factor... or it could be a terrible lost opportunity and poor planning. I've shown friends from other countries around the waterfront and in a mere few blocks youve covered it all and youre left thinking, wow, thats it?
 
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alklay said:
And to justify the 'colour' of Corus, using other sites in other cities, and then stating that they should not be models for what Corus should be, is a twisting of logic that is simply incomprehensible.
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That other good architects know - as well as Jack Diamond does - how effectively neutrals can be used doesn't make their buildings "models" for him to follow or "justification" for what he does ( your words, not mine ) at all. Corus is entirely a product of our own development as a city.

Harbour Square, and the public green space to the south of it, was a pioneering residential development planned in the mid-'60s - a time when few considered the declining industrial waterfront as a potential residential district - and built a decade later, when Harbourfront was just up and running. I don't know whether it jump-started other developments, but we've seen a startling turn-around in attitudes to the waterfront since then - without construction of the iconic/heroic structures that some crave and which Alvin refers to. Anyone who considered living by the lake in those early days would probably have been dismissed as crazy, and now everyone seems to want to.

Still, the real surprise to me, as someone who has visited the harbour since I was at high school in 1970 and went there with friends to take photographs of the decaying industrial landscape, has been how long it has taken for a building such as Corus to join the few other office buildings down there. This is a long term project, though, and I agree with Riverdale Rink Rat about the cumulative effect that a variety of residential, commercial, institutional, recreational and office uses will have in the revival of the harbour.
 
Urban Shocker said:
That other good architects know - as well as Jack Diamond does - how effectively neutrals can be used doesn't make their buildings "models" for him to follow or "justification" for what he does ( your words, not mine ) at all. Corus is entirely a product of our own development as a city.

Harbour Square, and the public green space to the south of it, was a pioneering residential development planned in the mid-'60s - a time when few considered the declining industrial waterfront as a potential residential district - and built a decade later, when Harbourfront was just up and running. I don't know whether it jump-started other developments, but we've seen a startling turn-around in attitudes to the waterfront since then - without construction of the iconic/heroic structures that some crave and which Alvin refers to. Anyone who considered living by the lake in those early days would probably have been dismissed as crazy, and now everyone seems to want to.

Still, the real surprise to me, as someone who has visited the harbour since I was at high school in 1970 and went there with friends to take photographs of the decaying industrial landscape, has been how long it has taken for a building such as Corus to join the few other office buildings down there. This is a long term project, though, and I agree with Riverdale Rink Rat about the cumulative effect that a variety of residential, commercial, institutional, recreational and office uses will have in the revival of the harbour.
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A truer statement there could not be, sadly.
 
Why sadly? Just because it doesn't have a glass ceiling like the glass ceiling in some other building in some other city that fanboys like you want it to look like? That's truly sad.
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
Tewder:

Contempuous of context? I mean, if there are any issues it is that this building is contextual to a fault.

AoD
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AoD, 'contempuous' of context in the sense that Corus could really be built just about anywhere, and indeed would probably feel more appropriate and more at home in a suburban industrial park along a highway where the 'specialness' of the site may be justifiably ignored. To ignore the specialness of the Toronto waterfront as context seems negligent to me, and this doesn't necessarily intend to imply that we need to push as far as 'iconic' in design, even if an icon for our generation to mark the rejuvenation of Toronto's waterfront is not a completely gratuitous concept given the banality that marks building development there thusfar.

I am assuming that those who react viscerally here to projects like these are not reacting solely to 'Corus' per se, but to the long history of bland, contemptuous building that mark the city in general (hello TLS, Torch, Metro Place, and can we go on...) and the Waterfront in particular. We've already suffered Harbourfront and the curtainwall of fugly condos that line the central downtown waterfront, and now we get equally fugly office buildings. And yet some here feel we're supposed to cheer and lump it because it's better than the post-industrial toxic mess that was there before... no thanks. The wasted opportunity is all the more difficult to accept given the blank slate of potential this magnificent site offered. Leave it to good ol' hogtown to screw it up.
 
Shocker: again, you miss the point. "Good" or "Bad", "right" or "wrong" is subjective...
the point was that you were being hypocritical calling PE a fanboy when clearly you have your own version of that behaviour.

and just to throw in a cheap shot, Clewes couldnt punch his way out of a cardboard "BOX" if his career depended on it! (I bet I'll take some heat for that one)
 
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