AndreaPalladio
Senior Member
No, just as the ridiculous pretentious twaddle that it is.
Toronto 401 Bay Street | 143.86m | 33s | Cadillac Fairview | WZMH
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UrbanFervour
Active Member
Anyone who earnestly uses the word "twaddle" should not be throwing around the word "pretentious."
LUVIT!
Senior Member
I've often looked at this office tower and thought how it didn't work with the old 'Simpsons' department store, However it says what it says about the time it was built and the style of those times when 'urban renewal' and flight to the suburbs was a big worry for the inner core of the city. Having said that I too think the proposal is much much worse and perhaps even disrespectful. It's all about the money in the end I'm certain.
ksun
Senior Member
As Winston Churchill said: "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."
Not sure Churchill's taste will help with your argument. After all, that's the man who has famously said "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" against the Kurds and bragged about shooting at least three "savages" in Sudan.
Rather distasteful I would say.
UrbanFervour
Active Member
Sounds like we could use someone like him in the UT forum.
maestro
Senior Member
Be more valued in the Republican primaries.
Lenser
Senior Member
It must be Friday.
adma
Superstar
And, once again, to reiterate: it isn't just about the existing tower--it's about the City-Hall-vicinity context; and, "heritage" or not, there *should* have been some official planning guidelines dictating that any significant project within this zone be subject to more rigorous design et al review than the norm. As opposed to what seems to be the case here; the scheme being basically rubber-stamped by the Buildings department without sufficient input from Planning or Community Council or any other concerned interests that may or may not include Heritage. Thus: this jerkwater-yokelville Rape Of The Simpson Tower...
maestro
Senior Member
Staff can barely keep up with planning this city's growth. The current system of consult this, review takes too much time and you want to add another layer?
It is about time the city conducts a heritage study to develop a complete inventory of heritage properties with a grading system that clearly defines what can be altered and what can't. Just about every other city has this. Unlikely, it would save this building.
The facade is trash. It can be replicated with new precast but, is that really preserving heritage?
It is about time the city conducts a heritage study to develop a complete inventory of heritage properties with a grading system that clearly defines what can be altered and what can't. Just about every other city has this. Unlikely, it would save this building.
The facade is trash. It can be replicated with new precast but, is that really preserving heritage?
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adma
Superstar
First, when it comes to the vicinity of Old + New City Halls: yes, I'd recommend another layer. And if you feel that's too many hurdles for to jump, tough titty. But yeah: I know certain folks within the real estate and development industry hates hurdles or induced "holding patterns" with a passion, just like they did back in the 45-foot-height-limiting Crombie era. But once again: tough titty.
And second, re heritage-studies and whatnot: keep in mind that what you're suggesting can actually be a never-ending, ever-evolving process, something which can be quite cumbersome to maintain and/or vulnerable to what-makes-or-doesn't-make-the-cut politics of one sort or another. And it certainly ain't no "finite thing"; remember how, as mentioned earlier, when the *original* Simpson's designation took place in the 70s, the Tower wasn't part of it, in large part because it was, at that time, too new for consideration. And perhaps, insufficiently "important" a la New City Hall or other contemporary landmarks that made the listing/designation cut early.
So, I'm just warning you. In order for said "heritage study" to actually *work*: in effect, you're decrying my recommended "another layer" while opening the door for something potentially even *more* cumbersome.
And that's a reason why (and especially in light of the location) I've been emphasizing planning et al: It's. A. More. Symbiotic. Thing. With that in mind, your kind of standalone "city should conduct a heritage survey" recommendation is actually quite condescendingly simplistic--there's more to good urban design than just the simplistic notion of "saving heritage", even if heritage/historical retention and awareness is a conscious part of the process. In fact, remember one of the knocks laid against the current Simpson Tower scheme being how whatever mongrelized bows to the existing tower design actually make it *worse*--that is, I'd even argue that a total glassy makeover a la 488 University would be preferrable to this design abortion, which is about as contrary to the save-this save-that heritage argument as one can get.
However, if by "unlikely, it would save this building", you're suggesting that the Simpson Tower still wouldn't (or perhaps even *shouldn't*) make the listing/designation heritage cut even if we weren't in the present eleventh-hour if not Cinderella-pumpkin situation...well, maestro, that's why people like you aren't and shouldn't be in charge of making heritage decisions. (Keeping in mind that there's even less "important" heritage-status 60s-skyscraper cases in the core: 110 Yonge, 11 King W, etc--if giving Simpsons "status" is a mistake, I guess those were mistakes, too, huh?)
Oh, and re "the facade is trash": if it's simply about the condition of the existing concrete, under the circumstances that's a easily remediable red herring, whether "in kind" or not. What's at issue here is the replacement of "trash" with something more like smelly, rotten aesthetic sewage. Or if I may apply the classic overreaching-heritage-advocate's overwrought comparison point, it's like using postwar Penn Station's grungy filth as an alibi for Luckman's sewage. Okay?
adma
Superstar
Though I'll have to parenthetically add: if we're to go by a more comprehensive "grading system" approach to heritage regs rather than the present listing/designation formula that turns everything it touches into something prima-donna-like, it *might* offer more leeway to redeveloping a 110 Yonge or 11 King W. Thus, we revisit the same old UT-thread "if it weren't for those meddlesome hysterical-preservationist worrywarts" arguments over everything from Mirvish/Gehry to Stollery's...
maestro
Senior Member
I'm exactly like you except for one thing. I'm realistic. Ideally, no building should be altered from its original concept. The realities are very different. These are massively expensive investments. Most of these guys with their multi-billion dollar portfolio still have to beg for money from people like us. They can't expect to win over tens of millions with a plan that doesn't attempt to "enhance/modernize" the dated design. That's where heritage bylaws come in to force. However, your argument over the worth of this building has been quite hollow resorting to personal attacks and preaching. I just don't see the history or architecture that would garner a hands off designation. I'm quite certain the original architect knew his design would be short lived.
I also disagree that heritage perservation isn't by and large finite. Weatherproof drywall and sanded acrylic paint is a far cry from masonry buildings or early curtainwalls of granite panels fastened to masonry walls erected between the steel structure.
I also disagree that heritage perservation isn't by and large finite. Weatherproof drywall and sanded acrylic paint is a far cry from masonry buildings or early curtainwalls of granite panels fastened to masonry walls erected between the steel structure.
adma
Superstar
Except that in that telling, it still treats "heritage" patronizingly--more as a plastic-bubble outside annoyance than as part of a broader planning symbiosis. And by portraying it in excessively no-enhancement/modernization "obstructionist" terms, it's a little too reminiscent of homeowners/agents grumbling about how heritage designations mean you can't replace knob-and-tube wiring or whatnot. Which also means, for it to "work" for these parties in question, you'd actually have to not broaden, but euphemistically *rationalize away" Toronto's present-day listable/designatable heritage stock--sort of like a heritage Common Sense Revolution. And that--in effect, your kind of "realism"--is something I reckon the heritage community is likelier to fight than welcome.
Remember, the big-portfolio mentalities we're dealing with are not terribly unlike the mentalities in this article http://torontolife.com/city/mcmansion-wars-neighbour-versus-neighbourh-forest-hill/
in this particular paragraph
The teardown craze in Forest Hill began roughly around the time that North and South Rosedale became Heritage Conservation Districts. These designations came about due to protectionist residents committed to defending the neighbourhood’s “clearly discernible character as a picturesque suburb with varied architectural styles” (as stated in the group’s heritage guidelines). It’s now next to impossible to build a new house in Rosedale, unless you’re willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars at the OMB. Real estate agents and builders actively discourage their clients from buying there. As a result, anyone looking to build a new home in a wealthy neighbourhood close to downtown heads west. Over the past decade, 171 new homes have been built in Forest Hill; in Rosedale, 38. One high-end Toronto builder tells me Rosedale’s historical designations have backfired, particularly in North Rosedale. “The guidelines aren’t creating better streetscapes. They’re saving a lot of houses that aren’t worth saving.”
Is *that* what you'd sympathize with?
And I'm quite certain that the original architects of a whole slew of even older, and designated, and preserved old buildings "knew" that their designs, too, would be "short-lived"; or at least, inevitably consumed by the inevitable ebb and flow of organic urbanity--it would've boggled their minds that "ordinary" commercial frontages along Yonge or Queen or Spadina or whatnot would one day be cherished rally points. Even Edwardian-era futurists could have foreseen, by 2015, something like Old City Hall "inevitably" falling on behalf of a skybridged skyscraper metropolis full of airships and what have you. The comprehensive "preservation mentality" as we know it is only half a century old; and re the original architect's vision, remember that Parkin planned to remake the *entire* Simpson block and (despite whatever claims to OCH being a conscious part of NCH/NPS's urban setting a la CCN relative to Commerce Court) was pretty much resigned to "progress" and whatever fate befell Old City Hall. Like you, the Parkin braintrust would've claimed to be "realistic", even though they were against the grain of the nascent "preservationist mentality". But that's no reason to spite the existing tower as a fait accomplii, much less tut-tut the heritage crowd with "hey, this is what you were rallying against half a century ago, why are you rallying on its behalf now?"
And besides, note that I was purposely allowing for *more* flexibility than the proverbial "hands off designation", even suggesting that the makeover might have been better off if it went *further* in obliterating the existing design and aspect. However, I'm just warning you: given precedent, *if* a heritage listing designation were pursued here presently, in 2015 as opposed to 1975 or 1985 (and factoring out the present scheme underway), if it were up to preservation staff and the heritage community it'd likely pass with flying colours. Notwithstanding your "I just don't see the history or architecture" claim, which betrays either ignorance or hostility as to where the state of the heritage-recognition art is. (And maybe--just as with the Rosedale HCDs--that's what scares the real estate/development vested interests: they know that once the designation-process gears start turning, they *really* need to get the maestro-esque anti-designation lobbyists in place, otherwise they haven't a chance in blazes. Which may even be a reason why the Simpson's scheme came about through a kind of municipal-bureaucratic subterfuge, and we didn't really get a chance to "witness" the actual scheme in full rendering until it was too late.)
In that case, might as well list/designate nothing recent-past other than a select few "obvious landmarks" a la New City Hall--sort of like the post-WWII version of Le Corbusier's "selectivity" (Hey! There's Place Vendome!) in his plans for Paris.
Maestro, you sound like the kind of character who, in accompanying someone pilgrimaging for intact Midcentury Whatever (Don Mills-style housing subdivisions et al), would grumble about how this is all a waste of time because it's all obsolete junk that's falling apart and that clinging to it is like clinging to dial-up or Windows 95. No, you're not "exactly like me"; and if you find any of that water torture by your "realistic" standards, that's your problem...
thecharioteer
Senior Member
I think that it's fair to say that the architectural merits of the Simpson Tower are not generally appreciated by the public at large, and through them the politicians and planners and heritage community (notwithstanding the hand-wringing over the Bata Building and the sporadic efforts of groups like Dominion Modern et al). Even buildings under public ownership have fallen by the wayside with nary a peep at the time (Exhibition Stadium, Bulova/Shell Tower). The Odeon Carlton was offered to the City for $1 and was declined. Riverdale Hospital? The Dickinson buildings at Regent Park?
The current attitude to Modernism/Brutalism (hostility? indifference?) has overtones to 20th century attitudes to Victorian architecture which I came across in a wonderful article in The New Criterion called "The New "Horror Victorianorum"". (http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-new--Horror-Victorianorum--8281)
Some excerpts (my boldings):
The fact is, by the 1920s, the Victorian architectural legacy was looking considerably shopworn, veiled by a half-century’s worth of grime. It was this pall of soot, as much as the Victorian weakness for New Jersey brownstone, that prompted Lewis Mumford to call his study of late-Victorian America The Brown Decades (1931). In reality, the Victorian city was practically built out of color—acid green serpentine, polished columns of red Scottish granite, glazed ceramic tiles of blue and gold, Ohio sandstone the color of tea and cream—but all Mumford could see was the color palette made by the chimney: “mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black.”
The physical corruption of Victorian architecture seemed the outward expression of its moral corruption. For intelligent observers of the 1920s, there was no question of its moral perfidy. When architecture ought to have squarely faced the challenge of radically new facts, materials, and social conditions, and created radical new forms to express them, it chose instead to rummage through history’s storage locker of dead styles, trying on one costume after another: not only Greek, Gothic, and Romanesque, but preposterous styles such as the Egyptian and Moorish. Architects shirked their duty to confront modern life in all its tragic complexity, preferring to amuse themselves with—as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner put it—a “fancy dress ball.”
The problem of such blanket condemnations is that they rarely discriminated between good and bad work. The Victorian era was not monolithic, and it lasted long enough (sixty-four years!) to be fiercely critical of itself. The Aesthetic Movement arose in reaction to mid-Victorian vulgarity, which Oscar Wilde despised no less violently than Strachey. And some Victorian buildings demonstrated high design intelligence, their architects as alert to the social and moral ramifications of their work as any socially conscious latter-day. But these fine distinctions were lost in the general Horror Victorianorum. Thus collective guilt fell heavily on the second half of the nineteenth century, and Sigfried Giedion could proclaim confidently in his landmark Space, Time and Architecture (1941): “There are whole decades of the second half of the nineteenth century in which no architectural work of significance is encountered.”
The wholesale discrediting of Victorian culture had tangible consequences. In polite museums, whole categories of painting fell into disfavor—Victorian genre scenes, Hudson River landscapes, anything Pre-Raphaelite; much went into storage or, in a few cases, onto the street.....But paintings are rarely destroyed, unlike buildings, on which the Horror Victorianorum fell cruelly. The life cycle of every building brings periodic danger points at which its owners must choose whether to repair and renovate, or else to demolish. Unfortunately, the moment of truth for Victorian buildings came when their reputations were at their lowest ebb, when their custodians found it convenient to excise an offensive carbuncle and replace it with something more “tasteful” (although almost never as solidly built). The saturnalia of destruction climaxed in 1964 with the demolition of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station in New York, which was hardly a Victorian monstrosity but rather a brilliantly planned and exquisitely realized monument to civic decorum. The demolition was a cultural catastrophe, and it brought the American historic preservation movement to life, although to a large extent the damage was already done.
The current attitude to Modernism/Brutalism (hostility? indifference?) has overtones to 20th century attitudes to Victorian architecture which I came across in a wonderful article in The New Criterion called "The New "Horror Victorianorum"". (http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-new--Horror-Victorianorum--8281)
Some excerpts (my boldings):
The fact is, by the 1920s, the Victorian architectural legacy was looking considerably shopworn, veiled by a half-century’s worth of grime. It was this pall of soot, as much as the Victorian weakness for New Jersey brownstone, that prompted Lewis Mumford to call his study of late-Victorian America The Brown Decades (1931). In reality, the Victorian city was practically built out of color—acid green serpentine, polished columns of red Scottish granite, glazed ceramic tiles of blue and gold, Ohio sandstone the color of tea and cream—but all Mumford could see was the color palette made by the chimney: “mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black.”
The physical corruption of Victorian architecture seemed the outward expression of its moral corruption. For intelligent observers of the 1920s, there was no question of its moral perfidy. When architecture ought to have squarely faced the challenge of radically new facts, materials, and social conditions, and created radical new forms to express them, it chose instead to rummage through history’s storage locker of dead styles, trying on one costume after another: not only Greek, Gothic, and Romanesque, but preposterous styles such as the Egyptian and Moorish. Architects shirked their duty to confront modern life in all its tragic complexity, preferring to amuse themselves with—as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner put it—a “fancy dress ball.”
The problem of such blanket condemnations is that they rarely discriminated between good and bad work. The Victorian era was not monolithic, and it lasted long enough (sixty-four years!) to be fiercely critical of itself. The Aesthetic Movement arose in reaction to mid-Victorian vulgarity, which Oscar Wilde despised no less violently than Strachey. And some Victorian buildings demonstrated high design intelligence, their architects as alert to the social and moral ramifications of their work as any socially conscious latter-day. But these fine distinctions were lost in the general Horror Victorianorum. Thus collective guilt fell heavily on the second half of the nineteenth century, and Sigfried Giedion could proclaim confidently in his landmark Space, Time and Architecture (1941): “There are whole decades of the second half of the nineteenth century in which no architectural work of significance is encountered.”
The wholesale discrediting of Victorian culture had tangible consequences. In polite museums, whole categories of painting fell into disfavor—Victorian genre scenes, Hudson River landscapes, anything Pre-Raphaelite; much went into storage or, in a few cases, onto the street.....But paintings are rarely destroyed, unlike buildings, on which the Horror Victorianorum fell cruelly. The life cycle of every building brings periodic danger points at which its owners must choose whether to repair and renovate, or else to demolish. Unfortunately, the moment of truth for Victorian buildings came when their reputations were at their lowest ebb, when their custodians found it convenient to excise an offensive carbuncle and replace it with something more “tasteful” (although almost never as solidly built). The saturnalia of destruction climaxed in 1964 with the demolition of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station in New York, which was hardly a Victorian monstrosity but rather a brilliantly planned and exquisitely realized monument to civic decorum. The demolition was a cultural catastrophe, and it brought the American historic preservation movement to life, although to a large extent the damage was already done.