Toronto Aura at College Park | 271.87m | 78s | Canderel | Graziani + Corazza

steveve said:
Not to mention, they made a HUGE mistake on the diagram...
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Aura's height will also be 252 m rather then 243 m. Throw a few numbers at most journalists and they get dizzy. :D

As for Trump, hmmm... I guess it's technically taller when you include that funny looking 30 m point.
 
KA1 said:
We will be anxiously waiting for your post and, perhaps, a picture or two as well
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I just got home today and it looks like 42 beat me to it. Marvelous photos 42!

The event was small, but exciting. After speaking to Canderel though, I'm no longer holding my breath for additional floors. As it turned out, just securing the 75 was a close call and required 10 separate lenders to finance. I suppose the scope of a project isn't just about height, but also size (Aura equates to building two One Bloor towers at once!).

I doubt we'll get anything this big for quite some time... :(
 
From The Star. Congrats if you made it to the end, I didn't.

DiManno: 75-storey condo a sign city ready to rise again

Viewing portals surrounding the mammoth condo construction project at Gerrard and Yonge Streets allow passersby to look down at what will rapidly be going up.

It’s a cavernous crater at the moment, the subterranean landscape all cluttered with goppledy-goppledy equipment: giant drills and excavators, cement trucks spinning their contents, cranes still at the baby stage of their perpendicular sprout, everything churning purposefully on a weekend afternoon because development — like rust — never sleeps.

An observer is particularly mesmerized by the humongous corkscrew thingy that plunges into the earth, pushing ever deeper into yet another hole for the placement of iron rebar and concrete, the underpinning for what will eventually emerge as a 75-storey, 243-metre high condo skyscraper, the tallest residential building in Canada.

Watching the screw rotate into the ground and then pull out dripping soil, the observer thinks: What fun Alfred Hitchcock would have had with that phallic imagery.

This condo complex, abutting the south side of College Park — Aura it’s called, after the fashion of la-la-lofty nomenclature for all new buildings a-borning — has itself become a metaphor, apparently, for Toronto transformed into a vertical city, at least for those who worship at the altar of Up. Of course, T.O. is hardly a stranger to the skyscraper scramble, with the glut of elongated bank towers at the bottom of Bay, testament to an earlier building boom of proudly (if grimly) erect financial HQs.

But those are workplaces with some uninspired retail malls at the bottom that turn into wastelands in the evening and weekends. The new growth, metastasizing like urban ganglia, is all about the residential as, evidently, a whole lot of people would like to live downtown and have the money to afford these posh addresses. That’s an indicator, I’m told, of an economically healthy metropolis with a lively inner core, though a bunch of those planned condo developments that looked so splashy and come-hither in glossy purchase brochures were stopped in their upwardly surging tracks when the financing fell apart.

Not to worry, development gurus and their political acolytes tell us; that stunting era has passed and Toronto is plump for progress again, reinventing itself anew as an Emerald City of high-rise sheaths and glass-glistening colossi, honkin’ huge blades of steel climbing towards the heavens like modern-day ziggurats.

It was funny, actually, listening to Mayor David Miller, Councilor Kyle Rae and other civic exec-ies wax rhapsodic over Friday’s official Aura ground-breaking ceremony by developer Canderel Stoneridge Equity Group. So rah-rah were the City Hall boosters, so schmoozing of the real estate developer, that, far from suggestive of Toronto as a sophisticated city, they made us sound like Hogtown and Hicksville, grateful for the investment.

Miller boasted that all of Aura’s 931 units had been sold, but for some of the ritzy penthouses, if you happen to have $17.5 million burning a hole in your pocket. Who are these people who can afford such luxe abodes? Maybe the same folk who will, starting Monday evening, descend on a swank Bloor Street jewelry store to buy the first 100 mined-cut-and-polished in Ontario diamonds to go on sale, a stash of gems valued at $1.7 million.

Not quite my crowd. But I don’t like diamonds anyway.

At the Aura sales office, the pretty ladies dispensing info and buyer applications must instantly clock me for a window-shopper only and I’m left alone to browse the model suite, which really isn’t that impressive. The square footage on a two-bedroom unit is smaller than my downtown walk-up loft – which is the real thing, not ersatz funk — and my ceilings are higher too, hah. I used to have a great view once upon a time also; could see the blue neon Toronto Star sign atop the paper’s One Yonge building, until all those ugly-as-spit condo clots sprang up in the vicinity, property value upscaling the bejeezus out of what used to be a nicely grotty neigbhourhood.

There are artist depictions of the “living work of art” Grand Lobby to be, the fifth floor “Rendezvous” terrace with umbrella tables, a breathless description of the tower’s “green” features, including direct underground access to the subway so residents can leave their cars at home “thereby conserving energy and reducing harmful emissions”. Like, these residents will really be using the subway. Hey, you know what I’ve got directly outside my building? A bus stop. Yup, came with the loft, along with the winos on the curb.

I do not, however, have — as advertised here, for the penthouse suites — a free-standing cappuccino machine, roof garden waterfall and bicycle storage room with “convenient air pump”.

At the entrance to the sales office, there’s a photo of the architect. He looks . . . short. Maybe that’s what vertically challenged men do — design really really tall buildings to compensate.

Another woman, clearly with more serious buying intent than moi, asks about remaining availability. “Well, we’ve had a few buyers who’ve defaulted on their payments,” the saleslady explains. “Those units we’d like to move as soon as possible …”

Hmm.

Another bit of curlicue salesmanship copy on the walls — over a sweaty girl’s killer abs — assures potential buyers that a hot body can be theirs along with a spiffy address. “This beautifully sculpted building will inspire beautifully sculpted bodies and you’ll find them working out on the podium level, energized by the cityscape below.”

All one has to do is buy in the premise — and into the premises.
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For a while there I thought she was moving toward some kind of point, but the whole thing just kind of devolved into aimless cynicism with a hint of bitterness.
 
I think one point is clear here. She's pissed she lost her view. She lives in a renovated loft on Adelaide east of Sherbourne. She was quite vocal in the past about hating new condos. This was when Kings Court was rising next door.

It was funny, actually, listening to Mayor David Miller, Councilor Kyle Rae and other civic exec-ies wax rhapsodic over Friday’s official Aura ground-breaking ceremony by developer Canderel Stoneridge Equity Group. So rah-rah were the City Hall boosters, so schmoozing of the real estate developer, that, far from suggestive of Toronto as a sophisticated city, they made us sound like Hogtown and Hicksville, grateful for the investment.
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She's right about this. I cringed several times as they made it seem we'd never seen a tall building before. And the president of Canderel's putdown of Yonge Street was quite revealing.
 
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Boosterism and hucksterism are hardly unique to Toronto. I'm sure Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Daley are just as shameless at groundbreakings in NYC and Chicago. Useless article.
 
She sounds like a bitch. Sorry but she does, I would hate to be her boyfriend. I probably would last 5 minutes before walking out on her in the middle of her rant of anger.
 
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