Toronto 25-55 St Clair Avenue East Building Rehabilitation | ?m | 11s | PSPC | DIALOG

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It's pretty incredible just how incompetently this job has been handled. Even if you are to take as a fundamental the "fact" that it "had" to be reskinned, this is essentially a child with a dull blade, not a trained butcher with the sharpest of implements. It's utter buffoonery and really does show how much Dialog's Toronto office deserves to be lumped in with the Kirkor and G+C bottom feeders.

 

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To me, there’s no doubt that the previous façades had value. Apparently a feasibility study found that it was necessary to remove them in order to hit the energy performance goals. That’s BS, of course. There are ways.

We are, however, seeing a lot of MCM buildings reclad for this reason, so it’s worth paying attention.

I was contemplating another, little-noticed but jaw-droppingly destructive currently-in-process rebuild today--that of the row of Victorian townhouses on the N side of Scollard which, ironically, once housed Ballenford Books--and was thinking: What. On. Earth. Has. Happened. for all these architects, developers, etc to now be so jaw-droppingly ***STUPID*** in how they handle the pre-existing--and using these alibis like "energy performance goals" for their acts of destruction.

But thinking more broadly of some of the hand-wringing over the "crisis in education", of how the realm of humanities/liberal arts/"enlightenment" has been marginalized on behalf of careerism, STEM, and the notion of university operating best as a glorified trade school--I think that generally speaking, the turning point for architecture came in the 90s with the rise of CAD technology; that's when it became more of a now-focused "trade", a fancier version of how engineers and design/builders operate. Yet it seems to me that up until then, it was considered "good form" for architects to be, by default, appreciative of and sensitive to the preexisting. If I described the former Meighen facade as "Cormier-adjacent classicism", they would have gotten what I was talking about. These days, they'd stuggle to know who Ernest Cormier (or Charles Dolphin) *is*; or they'd think that such descriptives are nothing more than pointy-headed architectural-history types "showing off". Thus nowadays, those concerns are hived off to the realm of "heritage architects" (the E.R.A. or Goldsmith Borgal or Taylor Hazell types of outfits)--and if you don't have any of those in tow giving you advice, you're lost in the woods. And being conditioned in a tech era, they think buildings should be like computer programs where you simply do not use 1994 tech in 2024--"leaving well enough alone" is out of the question. And of course, "appreciative of and sensitive to the preexisting" has come to be associated either w/greybeard NIMBYs or w/reactionaries who are tired of the Good Names of Egerton Ryerson or Sir John A. Macdonald being besmirched...

Excuse my rant.