The good, the bad, the ugly and the cheap: Critique today's condo architecture.

[innsertnamehere]

while aA is capable of creating great
Designs, i.e. four seasons, and burano, most of their recent stuff has been s***. aA is certainly not perfect, (quite far from it, actually) but it is one of the better firms in the city. i personally like hariri pontarini the most out of all torontos current architects, as they have produced some amazing designs as of late. Believe it or not, you can do amazing things with a building if the developer says there must be balconies on 3 sides. Take massey tower. An amazing design that i would love to see duplicated. Another thing with 501 yonge and 90 harbour is the fact that they are both so monotonous. They are both ctrl + c towers. Same height, everything. If you had even removed 2 floors from one and added it to the other, it would have been better. The details certainly matter, but its like putting a bodykit on a honda civic. No matter how nice the "design details" are, the car will still be a peoce of s***.

 

[dt_toronto_geek]

The Star of Downtown always comes to mind as bottom of the barrel bad, cheap and ugly. The tower is a mid-rise stucco mess that tries with some fussy details but fails epically, the towns look cheap, were thrown up in half a year and just plain hard on the eyes with that horrible yellow colour and cheap aluminum details.

 

[figaro]

can I ask a stupid question: what's the full name of aA people are talking about here?

 

[adma]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchitectsAlliance

(Somehow, linking to Wikipedia seems less harrumph-y than linking to their own site)

 

[Ramako]

Wow, that wikipedia page is incredibly out of date.

 

[GKW]

Will Toronto look like this in 20 years?

Norilsk, Russia

 

[Ramako]

Will Toronto look like this in 20 years?

No, it will not.

 

[MDV3]

rather scary looking isn't it?

 

[E.B.]

I think and hope most would agree that today's buildings, save a couple, don't hold a candle to the CIBC and Bank of Nova Scotia buildings, that were erected in the '50's. developers and investors don't have the stomach & money to "waste" on creativity. why did they have the stomach to do it then? and please don't say that was the style & era of that day. They put so much detail into their work that they didn't have to for a profit

 

[buildup]

Will Toronto look like this in 20 years?

Norilsk, Russia

You must be reading "House of Meetings" by Amis!

 

[buildup]

To me the greatest frustrations are not the worst buildings, they are the greatest wasted opportunities. ROCP and Aura are not hideous they are just incredibly mediocre (at best) which is unforgivable given their scale and location. There was so much to work with - a pre-existing park and one of the finest Deco buildings in Toronto. I am still confused how this happended, certainly the city was concerned early when they asked other architects to offer kindly suggestions to G&C.

 

[mrezwayz]

You mean the cheap architecture and design on the buildings that experienced the falling balcony glasses? They would be considered as poor quality of materials in rather "expensive look" style building. Society in which we live is highly fetish like, where the difference between the "real" and the "stimulated" are highly blurred to a point where we can no longer recognize the "real", and we are absolutely incapable of describing the architecture in Toronto.

 

[Jonathan Carruthers]

FYI -From Harper's Magazine, July 2018
The Death of a Once Great City
The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/

 

[SunriseChampion]

FYI -From Harper's Magazine, July 2018
The Death of a Once Great City
The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/

Great article. Cheers for the link!