The replication of a single design over multiple buildings is not just about making it cheaper. It's also about the the power to impress, the idea being that a complex of buildings is more impressive than just one building of the same design; "look at us, we're important enough to fill a whole city block, not just a site on the block", that kind of thing. The twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York were the obvious ultimate example of that… and still, right across from them are the three sibling towers of the World Financial Center. In Kuala Lumpur you get the Petronas Towers which compound their power to impress through the bridge linking them, and the Puerta de Europa Towers in Madrid which manage to lean toward each other to ratchet up their effect.
Twinned or tripletted or quadrupled residential towers are more common than replicated office towers though, and that's not just a Toronto thing, it happens all around the world. Yes, it brings down the design cost, but in the case of residential towers I think it's less about the power to impress and more about the cohesion of the buildings to help create a "neighbourhood" feel. I always wished that Palace Place had been a twin of Palace Pier, and not cousin; the two have always been less impressive to me because they are slightly off. In the Toronto of yesteryear when we didn't have some many impressive towers, the Leaside Towers were the ones I judged the Palace Pier cousins against, and despite their duller design, the Leaside Towers came of as more impressive because of their identical nature.
There's nothing innate about a repeated design that bothers me, unless it's a just plain bad design, or unless it's repeated ad nauseum into a Le Corbusier-an dystopia (which has more to do with now rejected planning principles and not architecture so much). Two of something though, as long as it's a good design, is often twice as nice.
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Twinned or tripletted or quadrupled residential towers are more common than replicated office towers though, and that's not just a Toronto thing, it happens all around the world. Yes, it brings down the design cost, but in the case of residential towers I think it's less about the power to impress and more about the cohesion of the buildings to help create a "neighbourhood" feel. I always wished that Palace Place had been a twin of Palace Pier, and not cousin; the two have always been less impressive to me because they are slightly off. In the Toronto of yesteryear when we didn't have some many impressive towers, the Leaside Towers were the ones I judged the Palace Pier cousins against, and despite their duller design, the Leaside Towers came of as more impressive because of their identical nature.
There's nothing innate about a repeated design that bothers me, unless it's a just plain bad design, or unless it's repeated ad nauseum into a Le Corbusier-an dystopia (which has more to do with now rejected planning principles and not architecture so much). Two of something though, as long as it's a good design, is often twice as nice.
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