Toronto 96 Spadina | 69.5m | 16s | Allied | Sweeny &Co

Sweeny&Co Architects | The Bridge

This exciting office development located in the vibrant and historical King West area of Toronto integrates a new 330,000 s.f. high performance office building with two existing heritage buildings without disturbing them and incorporates another heritage building into the lobby. In this design...
www.sweenyandco.com www.sweenyandco.com


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I love it. Typical for Sweeny, the tower portion is minimalist, verging on bland if not for the diagonal hangers. The podium on Adelaide looks amazing though -- probably my favourite office podium this cycle. It perfectly captures the scale and rhythm of the heritage buildings while still looking modern. I also love how the arrangement of the terracotta panels evokes brick.
 
smably said:
I love it. Typical for Sweeny, the tower portion is minimalist, verging on bland if not for the diagonal hangers. The podium on Adelaide looks amazing though -- probably my favourite office podium this cycle. It perfectly captures the scale and rhythm of the heritage buildings while still looking modern. I also love how the arrangement of the terracotta panels evokes brick.
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If only we could get new builds (sans heritage) to recognize why this works so well and follow the principles.

It needn't be faux heritage facades (though I'm not rigidly opposed if done well); but the use of warm colours, varied textures, a fine-grained series of facades that break-up the mass at street level etc. should be seen far more often.
 
There are many world renowned architects and designers who laugh and ridicule Toronto's facendectomy trend and historical preservation regulations, because they know poor and distasteful design work can easily get passed off as "historical preservation". Fortunately Allied is one of the very few developers which properly integrates old heritage buildings into new builds.

I'll never forget I was fortunate enough to attend a sit-in discussion with Karim Rashid a few years ago (a very well known industrial designer) who lambasted Toronto's facendectomy trend, and was just dumbfounded at the whole situation. He was frustrated because he wanted to introduce so many unique designs to the city, but developers here just dont care for it and the government just turns a blind eye.
 
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Not to defend our city's bizarre passion for facadectomy, but I distinctly remember Rashid once going on about how he dislikes seeing books in people's homes because they're messy (except his own books, one assumes). It makes sense that he'd have such distaste for any messy visual evidence of history. Some people only like clean slates.
 
ushahid said:
Who is Rashid and how is he connected to this project?
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He's not connected to this project, it was just a general thought of how some architects and designers view Toronto's facendectomy trend, and how Allied continuously goes over and beyond what's required to keep Toronto's history preserved.

Karim Rashid
 
That seems to be the best of many worlds. That is, preserving the buidlings that need to be preserved, while stacking the new stuff on top of it in a compelling way and then nicely tying it all together. Doug "The MZO" Ford, needs to take note.
 
I don't think he believes in taking notes...ever.

Anyways, although I do dislike plopping glass boxes on lovely warehouse buildings, at least Allied does it right...they really pay attention to the details and don't cut corners.
 
Better than the first rendering but still a plain rectangle box on top of some old buildings that don't deserve the embarrassment.
 
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