Toronto 522 University Avenue | 232.35m | 64s | IA Financial Group | WZMH

It’s so clean now, from one of the worst proposals to one of the best.

Someone at WZMH had a dig through the archive:
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Doppleganger said:
Now this is much more like it! Kudos to all involved! Rather than saving 60% of the original building, they could easily have gone the standard route of facadism(similar to the United Building). At any rate, it's certainly a terrific example of how the DRP process need not be adversarial. Here's hoping that the 'c' word, ahem, 'collaboration', becomes the rule rather than the exception in cases like this!
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I'm slow to want to complain about the gutting of the United Building; they are spending more on retaining the heritage walls there than any other private project this city has seen. This is a newer building than United was, and maybe just that much easier to retrofit than it was that they can make the numbers work. To me, where this easily surpasses United is in the strong likeness of the original building in its residential offspring above.

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interchange42 said:
I'm slow to want to complain about the gutting of the United Building; they are spending more on retaining the heritage walls there than any other private project this city has seen. This is a newer building than United was, and maybe just that much easier to retrofit than it was that they can make the numbers work. To me, where this easily surpasses United is in the strong likeness of the original building in its residential offspring above.

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I'm pretty certain that what United's developers are spending today will be fairly well reimbursed when their units are all sold. Regardless of how much money a developer might spend, when we designate a building and then allow only a few external walls to be preserved, we lose any historical or architectural context that the building might have had. At the end of the day, a building, heritage or otherwise, is always more than its four external walls. When we gut a building, particularly one that has retained a great deal of its original interior, not only are we deceiving ourselves by calling it preservation, but we're shortchanging our future. European cities like Paris, Brussels, Berlin et al., with far greater stock of heritage structures than us, have understood this for years, and it is well reflected in their city centres.
 
Doppleganger said:
I'm pretty certain that what United's developers are spending today will be fairly well reimbursed when their units are all sold. Regardless of how much money a developer might spend, when we designate a building and then allow only a few external walls to be preserved, we lose any historical or architectural context that the building might have had. At the end of the day, a building, heritage or otherwise, is always more than its four external walls. When we gut a building, particularly one that has retained a great deal of its original interior, not only are we deceiving ourselves by calling it preservation, but we're shortchanging our future. European cities like Paris, Brussels, Berlin et al., with far greater stock of heritage structures than us, have understood this for years, and it is well reflected in their city centres.
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This is the wrong thread to get too deep into the United Building... but while I believe that we have to do much more in regards to preserving embodied carbon for environmental reasons, and we should preserve interiors that are notable… without knowing its particulars, I have to satisfy myself that Toronto Preservation Services did not find attributes of the United Building's interiors there that they insisted on retaining. I certainly don't remember any outcry from the city's architectural community at the time that it was going to come down that we were losing anything out-of-the-ordinary. Maybe there were some attributes of its interiors that raised it above the nondescript, but they failed to tip the scales for the group making the decisions then. Failing heritage designation, building owners have to weigh the costs of preserving a building solely for its age, if they can no longer afford to maintain it.

In the 522 University case, the ownership have come 'round to believing that saving what they propose to of it will make business sense for them, and thank goodness, as they've got a plan that preserves most of the embodied carbon, preserves the architectural expression, and celebrates it will a sensitive addition to the top.

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interchange42 said:
This is the wrong thread to get too deep into the United Building... but while I believe that we have to do much more in regards to preserving embodied carbon for environmental reasons, and we should preserve interiors that are notable… without knowing its particulars, I have to satisfy myself that Toronto Preservation Services did not find attributes of the United Building's interiors there that they insisted on retaining. I certainly don't remember any outcry from the city's architectural community at the time that it was going to come down that we were losing anything out-of-the-ordinary. Maybe there were some attributes of its interiors that raised it above the nondescript, but they failed to tip the scales for the group making the decisions then. Failing heritage designation, building owners have to weigh the costs of preserving a building solely for its age, if they can no longer afford to maintain it.

In the 522 University case, the ownership have come 'round to believing that saving what they propose to of it will make business sense for them, and thank goodness, as they've got a plan that preserves most of the embodied carbon, preserves the architectural expression, and celebrates it will a sensitive addition to the top.

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I'm in complete agreement with your assessment of 522 University Ave. As for facadism in general, though it occurs just about everywhere in North America, Toronto seems to excel at the practice of saving one or two walls of a heritage structure and brazenly passing it off as preservation. Though I don't have any statistics at hand, going by what I've seen over the past several decades, I also have to wonder whether Toronto Preservation Services has ever found an interior they consider worthy of retaining.
 
This made my day. If realized this could change many people's perceptions of 70s office architecture. Perhaps, the impulse to destroy can be replaced with an interest in preservation, restoration, and inclusion in future proposals. The much hated Toronto Star building on Queens Quay deserves this same treatment imo. Maybe it's not too late.
 
rdaner said:
^In what way is the Star Building interesting?
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Colour, texture, proportions, solidity, recessed windows. It utterly fails in its interaction with the pedestrian realm but as 522 University Avenue shows, these issues can be addressed and turned into something beautiful. People are far too ready to destroy rather than recognizing existing attractive qualities and capitalizing on them. Do people just not see what's possible or is it laziness? I'm not quite sure.

Architectural layering is important, especially.in rapidly transforming places like Queens Quay. 522 University and the Toronto Star building aren't all that different. Toronto Star could be an asset for the area but suspect its value and potential won't be recognized. I thought the same thing would happen to 522 University Avenue but looks like it will survive after all.

I'm confident that the folks down at WZMH are talented enough that they could achieve a similarly successful result with the Toronto Star building. Or will we find ourselves lamenting the destruction of a Toronto Star building twice? Sometimes we just never learn from past mistakes.
 
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...the current plan is to tear down the TorStar building, as the Pinnacle likely wants to shed any office component for this block. If that being the case, it should be demonstrated how to best keep that building in converting it to a residential. Or to convince them it would be in their best interests to keep the respective office component while adding residential towers like what's being proposed here.

And oh yeah, HP Sauce is currently looking after the architectural portfolio for this as far as I am aware:

Source: https://urbantoronto.ca/database/projects/pinnacle-one-yonge-commercial.42494
 
isaidso said:
Colour, texture, proportions, solidity, recessed windows. It utterly fails in its interaction with the pedestrian realm but as 522 University Avenue shows, these issues can be addressed and turned into something beautiful. People are far too ready to destroy rather than recognizing existing attractive qualities and capitalizing on them. Do people just not see what's possible or is it laziness? I'm not quite sure.
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I don't think a building has to be interesting to be preserved, it's about keeping the city's architectural timeline intact so people will understand how we got from point A (log huts) to point B (King Toronto).
 
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Survive? I guess. Dropping a tower on top of it changes the entire perspective of the retained office block and will require significant structural reinforcement. It's unlikely to get equal attention everywhere else being modernist instead of Deco era. However, the joy over this improvement and, yeah, it's a big improvement, over just leaving it well alone is disconcerting to everything not already 50 storeys tall. Is it really needed to add x number of residential units here?
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