Toronto King + Condos | 53.03m | 17s | King Plus | TACT Architecture

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The yellow "brick" - actually precast - on south wall looks exactly like pre-cast. It was a good idea that seems to have failed due to the (inevitable) cheapening. (The similar black pre-cast brick on the Canary Condos beside Corktown Common looks pretty good so it IS possible.
 
DSC said:
The yellow "brick" - actually precast - on south wall looks exactly like pre-cast. It was a good idea that seems to have failed due to the (inevitable) cheapening. (The similar black pre-cast brick on the Canary Condos beside Corktown Common looks pretty good so it IS possible.
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Yeah the precast really looks awful. In the renderings it looked like it was going to match the heritage building, but it just looks cheap and fake next to the real brick, and it's not even close to matching its colour. It would have looked better if it was just a simple stucco texture.
 
They are not trying to match the colour. They are trying to complement the colour of the original brick, and not compete with it; the original brick is meant to stand out, drawing eyes to the heritage facade. We stated as much in the last front page story on King Plus.

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interchange42 said:
They are not trying to match the colour. They are trying to complement the colour of the original brick, and not compete with it; the original brick is meant to stand out, drawing eyes to the heritage facade. We stated as much in the last front page story on King Plus.

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All it does is make the heritage facade look scuzzy. If they wanted to draw your eyes to the heritage facade, they should have gone darker, not lighter with the precast colour!

Here's the render I was referring to:
king+_rendering0405-final.jpg


Yes, I know renders rarely represent the final product, this is just disappointing.
 
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Very True. This will be the first project that incorporates a scuzzy heritage facade without a full restoration. Your rendering doesn't show the ass end of the tower either. There is nothing yet to suggest the precast will continue on the sides facing the street.
 
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someMidTowner said:
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This photo shows something important. Why can't every new development look like this? Especially some of the "urban" greenfield developments. Look at how urban this block of King East looks. And what's interesting here is that all three buildings on this block are new or newish (last 10 years or so). And yet they display interesting architecture, meet the street well and offer some great retail spaces. I'll take this over the wide sidewalks and massive podiums that are found in places like Southcore.
 
Yep, I agree. On another thread somewhere, I forget where, I piped in on an interesting discussion about how the use of podium seems to be a carry over of suburban city planning. I think that's right, and that they're unfortunate realities of this building boom in Toronto. Cinema is perhaps the most egregious example, but I'd even say Chaz etc. on Charles E are examples of this unfortunate trend.
 
The podium is hardly suburban. It's meant to keep a consistent streetwall so you don't have blocks of 3 storey Victorian buildings interrupted by random point towers and plazas.
 
Well I spose there's two points there--whether they're suburban, and their functional purpose. I'm not sure whether their functional purpose, as you've identified it, shows that they're not suburban. But I'm more sure that, if that is in fact their purpose, they don't do a good job at it: the discussion in the other thread, wherever it was, was that podiums seem to break up street wall in a way that is bad, making the city feel less integrated and more cut-and-paste.
 
Podiums have many practical purposes, but maintaining and creating street walls is important. With tall buildings, there generally has to be a setback. In the past that meant towers-in-the-park lawns, parking lots and plazas. Now, the podium allows a continuous street wall with the tower set further back. The buildings on this block don't have podiums, but they still have a terraced setback similar to a podium.
 
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