Thompson, Freed's latest, is a standout addition
New luxury hotel and condo complex shows how a 12-storey building can retain a human scale
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
here
Published on Friday, Feb. 19, 2010 12:00AM EST
Last updated on Friday, Feb. 19, 2010 2:56AM EST
jmays@globeandmail.com
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Some 20 years ago, young Peter Freed found his way south from the posh Forest Hill neighbourhood in which he grew up, and discovered the grungy strip of King Street West between Spadina Avenue and Bathurst Street.
The bars and nightlife were the immediate attractions, but the district had other allures: hulking, half-empty warehouses and garment factories, small and lonely streets, the forlorn greensward of Victoria Memorial Square.
If the area is no longer so dilapidated, that's largely because Mr. Freed never lost his affection for it, and recognized its commercial promise. So far, he has developed six condominium buildings near the intersection of King West and Bathurst, and, he recently told me, there are six or seven more in the works. One of the newest condo stacks (designed by Toronto architect Peter Clewes) contains the Thompson Hotel, which is almost ready to welcome the demographic - young, affluent and nomadic - that Mr. Freed hopes to attract.
The hotel project is closely related to yet another condominium complex, called Thompson Residences, that will go on sale in the next couple of weeks. This 310-unit building is slated to rise near the Thompson Hotel on the King Street site of the old Executive Motor Hotel, an attractive piece of popular modernism that was aesthetically ruined by renovation a few years ago. (Had Mr. Freed sent in his demolition crews when the motel was still in its original state, you would have heard outcries from Toronto's modernist preservationists, including me. But given the grievous changes wrought by the motel's previous owners, the loss of the Executive is no loss at all.)
In terms of the advantages homeowners will enjoy, Thompson Residences will be no ordinary apartment block: In addition to the usual condo amenities - a health club and so on - residents will have access to the hotel's room service, cleaning staff and valet parking. Mr. Freed intends to install a 140-foot pool atop the building. Some of the penthouses will have private poolside cabanas. Suites will range in size from 400 square feet to 2,500 square feet, with prices starting at $200,500 and going up to $2-million.
It's the architecture, however, that makes Thompson Residences stand out with special brightness, not only among Mr. Freed's earlier, more routine projects in the area, but also among most other condominium buildings that have gone up in Toronto over the past several years.
Designed by the distinguished Montreal office of Saucier + Perrotte, this 12-storey structure is composed of two long parallel buildings, one facing King Street West, the other fronting on little Stewart Street. The King Street façade rises in two phases. At the bottom is a platform, featuring restaurants and shops, that stands two storeys high and is set forward hard against the sidewalk, thus keeping to the two- and three-storey stature and tough feel of retail establishments in the neighbourhood. Toronto architects of tall buildings seem to have problems making their towers hit the ground with clarity and authority, but not Saucier + Perrotte: Their podium is strong, resolute and very urbane.
As it goes up above this platform, and slightly behind it, the rest of the building shows a lively, beautifully rhythmic face to the city. The units are clearly expressed by their black aluminum frames, which boldly contrast with the white curtains veiling each apartment from the street. The poetry of this alternation of black and white is further reinforced by the dodging in and out of the clearly articulated units themselves, like drawers pulled out of a chest or pushed in, which makes the façade three-dimensional and vivid.
Last week, I spoke by telephone with Gilles Saucier about his firm's interesting artistic strategy of Thompson Residences.
"Instead of creating a big block with windows, we decided that each [suite] would be an individual unit that you pile up to create a building," Mr. Saucier said. "The building communicates at two scales: the big block at 12 storeys, and the individual unit. This creates a sense of individuality in the building, which is still 12 storeys, but with a grain that corresponds more to human scale."
When an area of the city is becoming dense, Mr Saucier continued, buildings can speak at only one scale - the immense - declared by expanses of windows in featureless facades. "We tend to lose the sense of the individual unit, and everything tends to have a texture of windows. Our idea was recognizing the individuality of each person living within the building. It's a functionalist expression we did for the building - the whole idea of being able to see each unit formally, individually represented. You can refer it back to the modernist project - a certain way of living together."
Here's the link I found that works for me: 
