metroTO
Active Member
Enter the 2Pac suite!
Toronto is generally a very safe city. Shootings will happen in any urban area and Yonge Street happens to be a very busy thoroughfare.
Toronto Massey Tower Condos | 206.95m | 60s | MOD Developments | Hariri Pontarini
Enter the 2Pac suite!
Toronto is generally a very safe city. Shootings will happen in any urban area and Yonge Street happens to be a very busy thoroughfare.
dt_toronto_geek
Superstar
Yonge Street is completely safe, just think of how many people walk between Queen & Dundas in a given month and the extremely low level of crime. Silly! I think this building is going to be an incredible place to live for real urbanites, just look at the terrific location with a subway a 1 minute walk away, amazing views from a great majority of suites and the world at the doorstep. Most of the suite designs are slightly better than average too. The only downside as I see it are the hospital helicopters.
LowPolygon
Senior Member
Hey, I saw all three of those concerts too! Along with the New York Dolls in June 1974, with Kiss as the opening act..."memories, misty water coloured etc etc".
Ok, pandora's box is now closed. Back to the beautiful Massey Tower.
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Why? What could be more "Lounge Lizard" than Casino Rama?
metroTO
Active Member
I personally not a fan of Yonge Street, particularly this stretch. As much as I love city life I find it a little too congested and chaotic and still feels a bit trashy, but that is just me. I'm sure there are a lot of people who like being in the thick of things.
I love how absurd some of these floor plans have gotten. Their junior 2 bedroom units should really be a 1 bedroom and their junior 1 bedroom units should be really a studio. Some bedrooms you could only fit a bed if you shove it into the corner of the room.
After comparing the floor plans, features and location I am close to purchasing at the nearby INDX. Still very close to everything, but on a quiet street and it's directly connected to the PATH system which is a really nice feature.
I love how absurd some of these floor plans have gotten. Their junior 2 bedroom units should really be a 1 bedroom and their junior 1 bedroom units should be really a studio. Some bedrooms you could only fit a bed if you shove it into the corner of the room.
After comparing the floor plans, features and location I am close to purchasing at the nearby INDX. Still very close to everything, but on a quiet street and it's directly connected to the PATH system which is a really nice feature.
Thanos
Active Member
Have you been to NYC? Would you ever go? Would you ever visit Times Square?
In the spring of 2010, there were 4 shootings in Times Square on the same night. I was actually in NYC then but nowhere near Times Square. Yet...........millions of people still go there.
You find 1 single incident. Jesus.........head shake
Automation Gallery
Superstar
I know...life in the big city can be scary for some, and a cakewalk for others
Tulse
Senior Member
Shooting? Hell, I come from Houston, where Toronto's annual murder rate would just be a lively weekend. Toronto is an absurdly safe city.
fedplanner
Active Member
We have a winner, less 20 stories. Look at page 1. I wonder if Archivistower was hinting about an early concept he had seen. Or maybe not.
Johnzz
Active Member
I’d be careful with INDX (built by Lifetime Developments). The difference between a builders glossy brochure and what’s actually delivered can be quite different. Here’s an example of what Lifetime Development actually deliver:
http://poorconstruction.blogspot.com/
a0th
New Member
hahaha are you kidding me, you really think downtown yonge is a hotbed of crime?
Johnzz
Active Member
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life...tower-with-a-sensuous-embrace/article2370107/
On Toronto's Yonge Street, a condo tower with a sensuous embrace— From Friday's Globe and Mail
In last Friday's column, I described a condominium complex (Context King West) that will be ingeniously shoehorned into a complicated downtown Toronto location. The 60-storey edifice called Massey Tower is another challenge along the same lines: An infill project proposed for a tough, tight spot in the urban core.
The new building is slated (if the city goes along with the scheme that Gary Switzer's MOD Developments Inc. has put forward) to rise at 197 Yonge St., across from Eaton Centre and just north of Queen Street. Fans and guardians of Hogtown's historic architectural fabric will instantly recognize the address.
The becolumned, long-vacant bank standing there today is a significant relic of the classicism that flourished in our inner-city districts during the decade before the First World War. Fashioned by the Toronto firm of Darling & Pearson and raised in 1905, the staid temple is also a valuable trace, well worth saving, of the vogue for anti-modernist Beaux Arts styling among the city's Edwardian elite.
Indeed, if Mr. Switzer’s plan is realized, the classical facade will be restored (by E.R.A. Architects), and given a new career as the principal entrance to the tower beyond. The intention is not, by the way, to spare a little fancy stonework from an otherwise useless building, then paste the salvage on something contemporary – a move that, to my mind, is preservationism run amok. In this case, the shallow four-storey office structure behind the bank’s decorated front will be refurbished and redeployed as a warren of studios for (the developer hopes) musical practice or some other cultural enterprise. This solution is probably the best we can expect under the circumstances.
These circumstances are determined by the crowded, very eccentric property Mr. Switzer owns. It includes, in addition to the bank, a small, derelict park, and is hemmed in by the loading dock of the building next door, the Victoria Street extension of the Elgin Theatre (another Edwardian landmark) and the rear of Massey Hall. Twisting through this dense chunk of city is a tiny system of laneways that provides vehicular access to the core of the block.
David Pontarini, founding partner of Hariri Pontarini Architects (and the designer of the similarly cramped Context King West), will sculpt the very tall, slender building Mr. Switzer wants to drop behind the bank. There is no room on the site for open-air parking. Cars will enter through the lane, be scooped up at grade by elevators, carried aloft and mechanically deposited into compartments on floors three through eight. In order to accommodate the old edifice immediately to the south, the foot of the new high-rise will stand clear of its garage entrance and loading area. And, in another neighbourly gesture, MOD is planning to give Massey Hall “the property interest they need to build their addition and renovate the Hall,†Mr. Switzer told me.
Along with its antiquarian Yonge Street entrance, Massey Tower has other features that promise to make it different from the usual soaring condo stacks in downtown Toronto. One is what happens in the park. In a bid to bring more retail activity to the east side of Yonge Street, Mr. Switzer has asked Mr. Pontarini to put an elegant glass pavilion into this gap in the streetscape. The transparent building will contain high-end shops, if all goes according to plan.
It’s hard to applaud this aspect of the project. Downtown development need not create new green spaces, but it surely shouldn’t eliminate old ones. Previous landlords, however, have allowed the little park to deteriorate into a muddy vacant lot. If there’s no determination to turn this private place into a public resource – and there doesn’t seem to be any – then perhaps the time has come for it to become a setting for interesting architecture. The park could have a worse fate. It could merely go into the future as the blighted spot it is today.
The most conspicuous facet of this proposal, however, is Mr. Pontarini’s romantic treatment of the tower’s exterior. There, rounded corners and undulating glazed balcony-fronts will mellow the cut of this big structure against the sky.
Massey Tower will not be the first place the architect has done something like this. While every tall-building designer is pressured by plain economics to produce yet another squared-off steel and concrete box, Mr. Pontarini has recently taken to modelling and carving the skins of his structurally conventional high-rises, generating sensuous, luxurious surfaces. We’ll have to wait and see if this strategy works here. But I’m guessing that Massey Tower will be the talented architect’s most coherent, aesthetically successful exercise of this kind so far, and another good example of artistic imagination turned loose on the hard-to-fill nooks and crannies in Toronto’s urban fabric.
On Toronto's Yonge Street, a condo tower with a sensuous embrace— From Friday's Globe and Mail
In last Friday's column, I described a condominium complex (Context King West) that will be ingeniously shoehorned into a complicated downtown Toronto location. The 60-storey edifice called Massey Tower is another challenge along the same lines: An infill project proposed for a tough, tight spot in the urban core.
The new building is slated (if the city goes along with the scheme that Gary Switzer's MOD Developments Inc. has put forward) to rise at 197 Yonge St., across from Eaton Centre and just north of Queen Street. Fans and guardians of Hogtown's historic architectural fabric will instantly recognize the address.
The becolumned, long-vacant bank standing there today is a significant relic of the classicism that flourished in our inner-city districts during the decade before the First World War. Fashioned by the Toronto firm of Darling & Pearson and raised in 1905, the staid temple is also a valuable trace, well worth saving, of the vogue for anti-modernist Beaux Arts styling among the city's Edwardian elite.
Indeed, if Mr. Switzer’s plan is realized, the classical facade will be restored (by E.R.A. Architects), and given a new career as the principal entrance to the tower beyond. The intention is not, by the way, to spare a little fancy stonework from an otherwise useless building, then paste the salvage on something contemporary – a move that, to my mind, is preservationism run amok. In this case, the shallow four-storey office structure behind the bank’s decorated front will be refurbished and redeployed as a warren of studios for (the developer hopes) musical practice or some other cultural enterprise. This solution is probably the best we can expect under the circumstances.
These circumstances are determined by the crowded, very eccentric property Mr. Switzer owns. It includes, in addition to the bank, a small, derelict park, and is hemmed in by the loading dock of the building next door, the Victoria Street extension of the Elgin Theatre (another Edwardian landmark) and the rear of Massey Hall. Twisting through this dense chunk of city is a tiny system of laneways that provides vehicular access to the core of the block.
David Pontarini, founding partner of Hariri Pontarini Architects (and the designer of the similarly cramped Context King West), will sculpt the very tall, slender building Mr. Switzer wants to drop behind the bank. There is no room on the site for open-air parking. Cars will enter through the lane, be scooped up at grade by elevators, carried aloft and mechanically deposited into compartments on floors three through eight. In order to accommodate the old edifice immediately to the south, the foot of the new high-rise will stand clear of its garage entrance and loading area. And, in another neighbourly gesture, MOD is planning to give Massey Hall “the property interest they need to build their addition and renovate the Hall,†Mr. Switzer told me.
Along with its antiquarian Yonge Street entrance, Massey Tower has other features that promise to make it different from the usual soaring condo stacks in downtown Toronto. One is what happens in the park. In a bid to bring more retail activity to the east side of Yonge Street, Mr. Switzer has asked Mr. Pontarini to put an elegant glass pavilion into this gap in the streetscape. The transparent building will contain high-end shops, if all goes according to plan.
It’s hard to applaud this aspect of the project. Downtown development need not create new green spaces, but it surely shouldn’t eliminate old ones. Previous landlords, however, have allowed the little park to deteriorate into a muddy vacant lot. If there’s no determination to turn this private place into a public resource – and there doesn’t seem to be any – then perhaps the time has come for it to become a setting for interesting architecture. The park could have a worse fate. It could merely go into the future as the blighted spot it is today.
The most conspicuous facet of this proposal, however, is Mr. Pontarini’s romantic treatment of the tower’s exterior. There, rounded corners and undulating glazed balcony-fronts will mellow the cut of this big structure against the sky.
Massey Tower will not be the first place the architect has done something like this. While every tall-building designer is pressured by plain economics to produce yet another squared-off steel and concrete box, Mr. Pontarini has recently taken to modelling and carving the skins of his structurally conventional high-rises, generating sensuous, luxurious surfaces. We’ll have to wait and see if this strategy works here. But I’m guessing that Massey Tower will be the talented architect’s most coherent, aesthetically successful exercise of this kind so far, and another good example of artistic imagination turned loose on the hard-to-fill nooks and crannies in Toronto’s urban fabric.
vegeta_skyline
Senior Member
Interesting, I believe that type of parking garage would be a first for Toronto.
I think 1 King West has parking in a similar fashion.
Ramako
Moderator
Isn't King Charlotte also going to have such a setup?