Toronto Nathan Phillips Square + Spirit Garden | ?m | ?s | City of Toronto

freshcutgrass said:
Ah...true....but we could employ the old "gotta break a few eggs" idea here. We accept the fact that reality means architecture and progress/commerce/profit go hand-in-hand. We're ok with this generally...as long as we are trading up in terms of architecture. With TD, I think we traded up.
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Yeah...but would you advocate that kind of "trading up" today?
 
Northern Magus said:
Speaking as someone who generally likes Brutalism, the Sheraton is mediocre Brutalism at best.
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Yet however "mediocre" it is, given the scale and context, it merits a certain respect, esp. if we accept that in our "embodied energy" age, demolition is generically undesirable. As I see it, the slab is decent--not *that* much the inferior of, say, Manulife. The way it all meets the street is problematic, but remediable--and believe it or not, in a manner that pays tribute to yet enhances and even "humanizes" the Brutalist aesthetic. (Not unlike the KPMB reno of the nearby Hilton lobby, in fact.) And as I always like to say (which underlies my French Quarter invocation): if you think it's bad now, imagine it overzealously "remedied". (Well, it already *is*, internally and in the porte cochere area--but all in all, benignly enough, considering, given that it's internal and semi-internal.)
 
gristle said:
I like the Sheraton Tower. The street level needs some TLC, but the building has a real presence.
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It's not unlike the problem with The Bay at Yonge & Bloor, what the heck can they do at street level to improve that stretch plus the underground parking ramp in the middle of the Sheraton block sure doesn't help matters. There are a few opportunities for improvement but given the design it seems to me that it's rather limited.
 
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This seems to be moving very slowly. I never see more than a few construction workers working on it. They need to hire a few more guys.
 
Typical for Toronto! What better way to save the city costs than to drag out construction for ever.
 
I work right across the street and the revitalization is going extremely slow (considering all the elements that the plan consists of). If they plan to do one thing at a time, and do that project very slowly, this will be a 10 year process.
 
I walked by here today, around 2:30-3pm, and I saw all of 1 person working on the site. Where are the workers? I thought Ford promised to get things moving quicker in this city?
 
So, it's now officially June 2011. Any news/updates on the first phase of this project? You know - the one that was supposed to be done in Fall 2010, then in Feb 2011, THEN in April 2011... Ugh. And what about the construction elements of the next phase - ie building the stage, etc?

I'm not usually one to complain about the pace of city projects etc - but the longer this takes, the less likely we are to be able to afford what was originally scoped, given the way that material-costs and wages tend to increase over time. Ugh.
 
It seems everything the City builds takes longer than announced, and involves extended periods where nothing much seems to be happening on the construction sites. I contrast this with Tokyo, where I once saw a road repair crew working around midnight - and they were all actually working. But my comment about the City's inability to manage construction is based on anecdotal evidence. Is there an objective data source that evaluates the quality of the City's construction management? Does the City even measure this stuff?
 
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