Toronto Festival Tower and tiff Bell Lightbox | 156.96m | 42s | Daniels | KPMB

I wish someone on city council, or some government body would have stepped in and said you can't get the go-ahead until you have a better design. lol
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Then almost every core poster here would demand that the developer go to the OMB and have the city over ruled.
 
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At ground level, one finds this building overbearing, monotonous, and it certainly does not have enough of an evolving streetscape with different elements. It's just got a big, broad, flat face that it presents to the pedestrian level. Add on to that a bunch more cheap or boring looking materials for the podium, and well, this thing isn't too great.

Why are Toronto architects scared to use a nice variation of materials for one building? Look at Vancouver... stone, precast, wood, glass, different colours of stone and wood and precast, brick, etc. And yes, I realize their towers are monotonous. But the podiums use a nice palette of materials.
 
oooh the lantern at the top is flickering with light... i'll post some pics

edit: here they are:





Looks a lot better in person than it does in the pictures. That plus it's still quite bright outside...
 
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This is when I wish my SLR camera had video capabilities. I live just around the corner from this, and the only thing I have to make video is my BlackBerry.
It looks really cool. Although not what I was expecting. Is the other portion also going to be lit up, or just this part?
 
khristopher said:
This is when I wish my SLR camera had video capabilities. I live just around the corner from this, and the only thing I have to make video is my BlackBerry.
It looks really cool. Although not what I was expecting. Is the other portion also going to be lit up, or just this part?
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Im kind of disappointed the whole thing isn't lit up. From my place at Yonge/Carlton I can see it, but its so faint that its barely noticeable in the skyline.
 
(...)It could have been a poetic work touched by the sultry light of Atom Egoyan’s films. The exterior might have been sculpted as a vessel of drama, made gritty and raw as Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. There might have been elements of unsettling surprise, the way Wim Wenders amazed us in Wings of Desire.(...) Lisa Rochon

Is she for real? This is ridiculous and so arbitrary. I would very much her to explain how a building like this one could "amazed us" like Wenders in Wings of Desire? By putting angel wings on its roof? Come on!
 
urbandreamer said:
I agree with LR. It's today's version of the HBC centre--a fairly major blunder. Look at the lack of human scale--one huge restaurant dominates the ground floor while across the street a couple dozen restaurants take up the same frontage. Those blank walls and lack of red brick at the base make it very cold. S+P or aA would've done much better...
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If you wanna knock its lack of human scale, an HBC comparison is pushing it--and not just because there's a closer Crang & Boake bunker at hand, the Metro Convention Centre. Heck, if it were about the unnecessarily humdrum, might as well compare it with Metro Hall across the intersection...
 
khristopher said:
Canteen takes up like 1/8th of the length of Lightbox. I don't know what you're talking about...


I don't get what is up with all of the judging, when it's not open yet. Let's wait until we see lights on, and everything working as it's supposed to.
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You don't have to wait until the building is open to figure out how it'll be at street level. Just look at the site plan. The east side is actually pretty good - restaurant spilling out onto the street, lots of interaction with the street with the condo and Lightbox entrances. The west end of the building, OTOH, is pretty bad. A long, shallow space (anyone know what that room is?) with a featureless glass wall faces King Street - no doors, nothing visually breaking up the facade, no interaction. And a blank wall on the upper floors faces the corner. Not a very engaging streetscape on that side of the building, which is quite the blunder for a street like King.
 
Low quality from my Blackberry.

From the north east:
[video=youtube;48sT2Uyt74M]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48sT2Uyt74M[/video]

From the south:
[video=youtube;CDSNOQ9Nwtc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDSNOQ9Nwtc[/video]
 
Unbelievable that Rochon could call this building boring, yet declare that "A new standard has been set for building tall in Torontp" by the Bay Adelaide Centre.

If the Lightbox represents lost opportunities for architectural drama in Toronto, then Bay Adelaide should not even have merited a review from her. Beyond its lobby, BA is a non-entity; the dullest and most deliberately self-effacing glass box ever erected here, almost design-free... yet for Rochon it sets a new standard.

Hard to take her seriously anymore.

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Such a chasm in her opinion is a poor reflection on her own writing but doesn't mean her review of this building is incorrect-- the Lightbox is a combination of dreary, texture-less materials.
 
doug said:
Then almost every core poster here would demand that the developer go to the OMB and have the city over ruled.
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I was kidding. But really, couldn't the Toronto P.D. or the RCMP step-in and make an architectural arrest?
 
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