rdaner
Senior Member
Actually, I like the fact that they are not setback as they might lend themselves to shopfronts at some point in the future.
Thirded. It's even worse when you consider that you can see so many examples of the real deal along the neighbouring streets. The massing/scale is great but the aesthetic is very uninteresting.
In his 2007 Best & Worst year-ender, John Bentley Mays awards Wengle a Worst House prize:
This award goes to Toronto architect Richard Wengle, for his shocker on Forest Hill Road at Heath Street West. This flamboyant precast concrete building is a hectic, bulging little encyclopedia of everything architectural modernism, for good reasons, denounced and abandoned: colossal square columns in the Corinthian order, whimsical wrought-iron balconies, patches of bas-relief mythological sculpture, scraps of Versailles and other frivolous ornaments from the historical dust bin. Like the many other ancien régime fantasias sprouting up in old neighbourhoods across Toronto, this house is out of place in a modern city.
It also cuts rudely against the grain, the general sense, of the Forest Hill area. For all its rather dour propriety, and the mediocrity of much of its architecture, the neighbourhood has integrity that an architect offends at his peril. The extravagant house by Mr. Wengle is just such an offence against a part of town that has traditionally avoided show-offish gestures — but that's now getting far too many of them.
Handsome buildings like 99 Scollard, which won Drew Mandel a City of Toronto Urban Design Award in 2007, are the antidote to the creeping Wengleization of Jerkville.