Mike in TO
Senior Member
This project originally launched over 2 years ago...
although it's faux Second Empire architecture ... but I don't mind the design at all, I like the architectural variety it offers, not everything has to be glass box to be good looking ~
Alone, it's a bit silly, but a whole block of these would be wonderful, far better than a whole block of plate glass and grey panels that will invariably look like utter trash in 20-30 years when the newness wears off and cracks and chips and stains and rust set in...stone and mansards and so on often looks better after a few decades.
I could assume that Design Guild will be clad with the crappiest precast ever, stained and chipped to death before it ever gets installed, but why assume that it'll be worse or uglier right off the bat than, for instance, the grey bricks on the new opera house?
As design, the ludicrously named Design Guild is inauthentic - a product of developer culture, of recycling a hodge-podge of historical styles for consumers who probably think this denotes "good taste" or something. To compare it to the work being done by any of our leading local architectural firms - who aren't channelling Second Empire ( or, if they were, would do something new with it ... ) - is just plain silly.
Our 'leading architectural firms' are just channelling other historic styles that they think constitute good taste.