"...quite sensitive to the original architecture," Come on, let's call a spade a space. The grounds are integral to the architecture in the same way that Nathan Phillips Square is integral to City Hall. . This is about rejecting those ideas about architecture and wanting to hide the building from view. This has everything to do with placing little to no value on 70s architecture.
Would people be giving this their rubber stamp if that were was Victorian era architecture on that block instead? Of course not. They'd be up in arms. I understand the issues with tower in the park developments but sometime people need to leave things alone. It won't be a popular view on here, but we need to preserve a few examples of this kind of architecture .........and this is one of the better examples of it.
Toronto won't, of course. Every era of architecture eventually falls out of favour and gets stripped away. I guarantee that 99% of what we're building today will one day fall out of favour. It will be deemed ugly and demolished with zeal.
I agree with you that 99% of what iis being built will fall out of favour - mostly because it's not even "in favour" right now. I also agree that we ought to preserve older buildings, including some modern and postmodern era buildings.
However, I see this particular move as a rightful rejection of 20th-century, tower-in-the-park urban planning schemes, rather than a rejection of the architecture itself. The people who gave us this building-as-tombstone, city-as-graveyard architecture thought they could impose a permanent order on the city and on society that would last for all time. In practise they inflicted major damage to the morphology of existing cities which are by nature, organic, shape-shifting, and ever changing.
This is also about the value of land and the demand for housing in the central city . When 100 Wellesley was built, a large swath of unused, permanently-in-shadow green space (on a major arterial road in the centre of downtown Toronto) was economically feasible because the population was a fraction of what it is now, the city was sprawling outward and very few people were interested in living downtown. Now, it's an extremely expensive lavatory for a few dogs.
