News   Nov 04, 2024
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Buildings you'd like to obliterate...

With all these buildings obliterated, will post-urban agriculture soon follow?
 
I know you're joking, but it's still worth pointing out that agriculture requires many decades or centuries of topsoil formation. Some people seem to think that if we could reclaim the suburbs for local food production if we needed to. Unfortunately, we can't.
 
Buildings you'd rather see DEMOLISHED

i was thinking, we have so many great buildings here, but some true eyesores dominate our skyline... they're some of our biggest buildings unfortunately...


1) first canadian place: i hate it so much
2) bay/wellington tower at bce place: its taller sister is slightly better, but this one crosses the line, i'm not sure whether the architects here were bored or fell asleep while designing it, but i can't believe this building got approved
3) holiday inn on king: ugliest building in toronto?? good thing, its smaller than the other ones...

etc....


please City!! we have to get rid of these!
 
i was thinking, we have so many great buildings here, but some true eyesores dominate our skyline... they're some of our biggest buildings unfortunately...


1) first canadian place: i hate it so much
2) bay/wellington tower at bce place: its taller sister is slightly better, but this one crosses the line, i'm not sure whether the architects here were bored or fell asleep while designing it, but i can't believe this building got approved
3) holiday inn on king: ugliest building in toronto?? good thing, its smaller than the other ones...

etc....


please City!! we have to get rid of these!

There are dozens, in fact hundreds of buildings uglier than the Holiday Inn. I too don't like the Bay Wellington Tower. It's basically a twin of the TD Tower and made of the same material. Toronto has way too many identicle buildings. Did they really need to build 4 TD Towers of the same design and colour?
 
The fifth TD tower, the Ernst & Young building, looks like it was squeezed into the complex and plunked uneasily on top of the old Stock Exchange as an afterthought. It is faux-Mies by Bregman+Hamann. In a perfect world I wouldn't mind seeing that one removed, to give some breathing space and return to the original plan. With its repitition of form, proportion, texture and colour the centre is considered one of Mies's masterworks. The Georgian and Victorian Toronto downtown that we admire so much was also built from many similarly-sized buildings, constructed with similar materials, all contributing to a similar sense of wholeness and continuity in the streetscape. Our current good neo-Modernist architects are producing buildings that are practically interchangeable in form, and they're doing much the same thing today that the Georgians and Victorians were doing - fitting in and expanding the context. It is perfectly possible to build an entire city this way, from beautifully-proportioned buildings that don't shout for attention and diss their neighbours.
 

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