Vaughan Expo City: Expo 1,2, & Nord | ?m | 38s | Cortel Group | AJT Architects

[junctionist]

Kind of interesting seeing a new skyline start to develop.

True, but the GTA has so many of these skyscraper nodes that it's getting banal. Entire neighbourhoods of midrise buildings would be more interesting at this point (the missing middle).

 

[someMidTowner]

Friday:

 

[WislaHD]

Damn, that is a lot of underused land in the background.

True, but the GTA has so many of these skyscraper nodes that it's getting banal. Entire neighbourhoods of midrise buildings would be more interesting at this point (the missing middle).

That would be quite something, but beyond the inadequacy of municipal zoning, it is also not something that is cost-effective for developers. See all the avenues where mid-rises have failed to take shape.

 

[jje1000]

While the design is nothing exciting, it is exciting to see a tower going up where the amount spandrel is controlled and accounted for in the design.

It actually feels like a glass building!

 

[Edward Skira]

 

[DarkSideDenizen]

 

[Edward Skira]

I've never been a fan of balconies. Unless they are inset I think they hurt the look of buildings. I think these buildings are looking really good. And that's due to the lack of balconies.

 

[A Torontonian Now]

Caught some nice shots from a Porter flight yesterday. Will be posting them to a variety of threads as I have time to do so. For a start, here's VMC, including this development:

 

[ProjectEnd]

Horrifying, wasteful, land use policy as far as the eye can see!

 

[innsertnamehere]

Interesting, you can see the outline of the new walmart under construction already. That's quicker than I expected.

 

[A Torontonian Now]

Horrifying, wasteful, land use policy as far as the eye can see!

That's particularly true here, but it strikes me on these flights how small an area of even Toronto proper is truly dense, despite all of the construction happening, and how much room there is to intensify. The demand is there; we really need realistic, modern, and more thoughtful zoning.

 

[WislaHD]

That's particularly true here, but it strikes me on these flights how small an area of even Toronto proper is truly dense, despite all of the construction happening, and how much room there is to intensify. The demand is there; we really need realistic, modern, and more thoughtful zoning.

This entire website is dedicated largely to construction that mostly takes places in small narrow corridors crisscrossing across the city where our planning regime has graced development to occur. Full-scale redevelopment of a large area such as what is taking place here in Vaughan actually feels rather foreign. I am curious to see what happens here because it would show the pattern for how other blank canvass locations (such as the area around Dixie GO) will develop.

But yes, this dichotomy between super-dense towers and 1-unit houses next to each other is surely unsustainable in the long run.

 

[interchange42]

There is SO much of that around the GTA though, there will long persist single family houses next to high density housing.

The area being shown in those photos, however, is mostly industrial, as the GTA also depends on a lot of horizontal buildings to function, mostly warehousing of course, and therefore industrial space is also at very low vacancy rates. It's just not realistic to expect that the whole area is going to become dense in the vertical sense anytime soon.

Was it Peter Ustinov who called Toronto "Vienna surrounded by Houston"? A little out of date now, that should probably be 'Manhattan surrounded by Vienna surrounded by Houston', point being Houston's still out there, and will be, to most extents, for the foreseeable future.

42

 

[CityStay]

I never knew that Ustinov was such a comedian!
And that he'd never been to Vienna.

 

[Edward Skira]

Ustinov said Toronto is New York City run by the Swiss