Toronto Corus Quay | ?m | 8s | Waterfront Toronto | Diamond Schmitt

When was the first time there was anything exciting or creative about Global Television?

(and Yellow card noted. I got carried away with my run-on sentences and tried to save myself the cheap way).
 
Yeah. I don't by any means think we should put Swiss Re here. i just wish there was a little more creativity to the design. For Diamond it is a pretty boring design. There didn't seem to be any little details to the design that really added to the proposal.

The west facade looked alright but i couldn't figure out if it was all glass or not.

All i'm asking for with this design is to have some fun. Why does it have to be a plain box. Would it be so hard to round off some edges or to add some influences of water into the design. The lighthouse could have been a great element if it didn't look like it was added as an afterthought. Its as though Tedco came along with the original building and the design review asked for something a bit more iconic so they threw in a column of steel bars for effect.

Have some fun with it. Play around with cladding, colour, shape. They even tried to make a point that it has a glass canopy that runs along the edge and it looked exactly like every other example out there. They even showed another example to illustrate how it was the same design.

Add some innovative window shutter system to keep the southern facade cool in the summer. They'll definitely need it in the summer months.
 
What quality of work have either Varacalli or E.I. Richmond done that might have earned them, rather than Diamond, the inside track with the Mayor, or TEDCO, in order to be in a position to get this untendered project? The possibility simply wouldn't arise.

While I agree that design competitions are a good idea, and this building might have been a good candidate for such a thing, jayomatic's contention that, "If this sort of land was available in any other waterfront in the world it would surely be part of some design competition" seems a bit of a stretch. Even if it were opened up, there is no guarantee that a "loud" Rogers Marvel type scheme would win out over more respectful local entries.

Toronto Style denial - the idea that creative people connected to the unique cultural and built history of our city that informs our present simply don't exist - is an expression of the inferiority complex that fuels all this world class nonsense. Scanning glossy foreign archiporn journals in order to find examples of similar looking buildings elsewhere in order to deny the validity of what we do here, or failing to see articles about what we do here and holding that up as evidence that we do nothing original, is indeed provincial.
 
There exists nothing but declarations - over and over again - that there is a local style (with unique traits characteristic of Toronto and not other places). Unfortunately, actual concrete examples appear to be more difficult find.
 
The problem here, as I see it, isn't that we don't have a 150-foot doorknob on the waterfront, or a crystal, or a tabletop, or something otherwise iconic.

The problem is that this building is a lost opportunity. Okay, so it's not going to be a museum or university or something else with a public mandate. But just because it's for private enterprise, does it mean that we have to lose the entire inside of that block, and content to walk around it? Who's going to want to walk around it in winter?

Some of this city's most beautiful public spaces are private. I'm thinking of BCE Place, and the Eaton Centre. The CBC building, and Diamond's new Engineering building at U of T.

What do they have in common? Atriums that connect from point A to point B, and give the public a reason to be in them; a reason to walk through them. An atrium that goes nowhere, as in the Symphony project, does nothing for the public, who can only loiter, and be seen as interlopers.

If we can't build a truly public destination on this central parcel of land, like the optimistic precint plans suggested we should, then we could have risen to the challenge of coming up with a private building that welcomed the public, that offered refuge from the elements and a pedestrian transit corridor.

But this just sits there, a big box we're banned from, with a little toy lighthouse off to one side to distract us. We could have done so much better.
 
"I'm sure insurance must be the most exciting career to be in if it requires an exciting building like this"

Insurance? Exciting? Waterfront?

Well, why didn't you say so:
building.jpg
 
Sir Novelty:

Who is going to want to walk around any Toronto building in winter?

Do you know for a fact that people will be "banned" from using this building and not offered refuge from the elements, or that atriums cannot be destinations in themselves rather than merely point-A-to-point-B passages to somewhere else?
 
No, sir, I do not know it as a fact. But I feel it in my gut.

But seriously, I think the odds of it becoming any kind of public space are significantly reduced by being enclosed on three sides. It would require programming to draw people in and keep them there. A transit function provides the purpose and incentive, and would require no active effort from the tenant.
 
Scarberian:

You made my afternoon with yet another appropriate Python reference.
 
Sir Novelty: How is programming things at Project Symphony in order to draw and keep people there an inferior model to a walk-through BCE atrium model without programming? For instance, the opera house programs free concerts, as does Roy Thomson Hall and they're not walk-throughs like the Eaton Centre - they're destinations. Private businesses could do the same if they wanted to.

Toronto has long been a major North American centre for creative people who work in many disciplines, talk among themselves, and exchange information with and exert influence over members of other creative disciplines. At various times different branches of our creative city - dance, theatre, design, music, visual art, to name but several - coalesce around new ideas and come to the fore. Distinctively Torontonian voices, modes and styles have historically abounded in many such fields; architecture isn't exempt from these forces since they are expressions of our unique, large, diverse and creative city.
 
The atrium doesn't appear to go through the entire building - it seems to have more in common with a fancy lobby than a walkthrough space.

Anyways, the more that I think about it, the more that I realize that this project is symbolic of all that is wrong with the waterfront - the unwillingness to follow through with previously agreed upon plans, for one. I find Diamond's involvment in this particularly appalling given his historic stance on East Bayfront and involvement with TEDCO (remember how TEDCO put forth a competing scheme for the precinct that got shot down the last minute) and how he subverted the entire process for his own, rightly or wrongly, beliefs. This isn't the same thing as building an Opera House, Jack.

AoD
 
Listen folks. There's still something very, how shall I say it, twerpy about this thread of discussion. Basically, we're dealing with classically Toronto "first-rate second-rate" design, as George Baird would've praisingly (yes) put it. Maybe it's a little conservative, could be better than it is esp. given the site--but you're painting it like it's Harbour Castle or something. Or like a 60s situation where they could have opted for Mies but chose Charles Luckman instead. Or like BBB's pre-Libeskind Ground Zero model. You're waaaay overstating the catastrophe. You're earnestly decrying it with all the saccharine bathos of "Sometimes When We Touch", like the honesty of the so-called architectural and urban failure's just too much. Chill.

Look, you may point and point to these "superior" Euro-models, but you're leaving me with the impression that you'd be the contemporary-architecture-fixated version of myopic dumb tourists if you ever actually visited London, Paris, etc, blind to anything that isn't, uh, heart-stoppingly spectacular and "of our time". Look; most of *their* fabric is first-rate second-rate (or just plain second-rate), too. And they're richer, and realer, for it...
 
There's still something very, how shall I say it, twerpy about this thread of discussion ... You're earnestly decrying it with all the saccharine bathos of "Sometimes When We Touch", like the honesty of the so-called architectural and urban failure's just too much ... you're leaving me with the impression that you'd be the contemporary-architecture-fixated version of myopic dumb tourists if you ever actually visited London, Paris, etc, blind to anything that isn't, uh, heart-stoppingly spectacular and "of our time". Look; most of *their* fabric is first-rate second-rate (or just plain second-rate), too. And they're richer, and realer, for it...
Click to expand...

Chill.
Click to expand...

Chill yourself.
 
The most disappointing part of this project is how it doesn't respect the TWRC plan for an angled wall creating a view corridor from Lower Jarvis. I don't expect the buildings built here will be any better than buildings built elsewhere in the city... but they should at least follow the massing and envelope guidelines set out by the TWRC. The Jarvis Slip open space is supposed to be a triangular large open space. I don't see any reason this building couldn't have followed the building evelopes outlined in the East Bayfront plan. What is the point of all the TWRC planning and community consultations if at every step morons at TEDCO and City Hall are going to try and step in and steal the show with non-descript buildings which could have been built anywhere being positioned in the waterfront haphazardly? This is maddening. So now we have plans for film warehouses, ice arenas in warehouses, and 905 style office buildings which don't follow neighbourhood plans at all. Wow, this waterfront is really going to be something else. I am really pissed at how Miller's city hall has handled the waterfront. Did he learn nothing from being shot down trying to intervene with the Diamond / TEDCO plan? The community supports the TWRC... get with the f$#@ing program!!
 
It does respect the TWRC plan as the plan clearly states two options for the Jarvis St Slip. One is angled and the other is square. Here is a quote from the Precint Urban Design Guidline (www.towaterfront.ca/dbdoc...5766e.pdf) "South of Queens Quay, the Jarvis Slip Open Space may be reconfigured to enhance the
opportunities for developing the Jarvis Slip Special Use Site, provided that at least 3000 sq. metres
of open space are provided with frontages onto both the Jarvis Slip and the lakefront".
 
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