Toronto Pan Am Village in the West Don Lands | ?m | ?s | DundeeKilmer | KPMB

DSC · May 18, 2014

The old Railway Police building has now been "unveiled" and seems to have new windows etc. It looked pretty good from a distance.

More interestingly there was a large A-frame sign outside yesterday saying Canary District Presentation Centre so I assume that WT will FINALLY re-open Cherry Street soon.

TheKingEast · May 18, 2014

Color? Yikes!

Northern Magus · May 18, 2014

TheKingEast said:
Color? Yikes!

I think it looks more like plywood that's there temporarily.

TheKingEast · May 19, 2014

Northern Magus said:
I think it looks more like plywood that's there temporarily.

ssiguy2 · May 20, 2014

That photo looks like a suburban office park.

Red October · May 21, 2014

ssiguy2 said:
That photo looks like a suburban office park.

Or housing for a Chinese factory.

junctionist · May 21, 2014

One thing that seems off about the district is how every building has a massive mechanical penthouse clad in generic panels. These buildings are dominated by generic structures on the roofs. The seniors housing building on King looks terrible because of the mechanical box. Condo developers generally stopped putting up buildings with ugly mechanical penthouses in the past few years, but this district has them by the boatload.

ProjectEnd · May 21, 2014

The mechanical penthouse is a fundamental element of a modern building so the decision to highlight or hide it is the architects' alone. Your opinion on whether the chosen treatment is attractive or not is equally subjective.

NBGtect · May 21, 2014

junctionist said:
One thing that seems off about the district is how every building has a massive mechanical penthouse clad in generic panels. These buildings are dominated by generic structures on the roofs. The seniors housing building on King looks terrible because of the mechanical box. Condo developers generally stopped putting up buildings with ugly mechanical penthouses in the past few years, but this district has them by the boatload.

You haven't seen the TCHC senior's building recently and that photo is months old. The mechanical penthouse looks just fine in real life as all of the spandrel panels were changed out to dark ones from the lighter grey ones.

junctionist · May 21, 2014

ProjectEnd said:
The mechanical penthouse is a fundamental element of a modern building so the decision to highlight or hide it is the architects' alone. Your opinion on whether the chosen treatment is attractive or not is equally subjective.

A mechanical penthouse may be discretely incorporated into a facade or emphasized, but in good architecture, the mechanical penthouse is integrated into the architecture even if the architects want to highlight it. That means that the penthouse isn't just a generic volume seemingly tacked onto an otherwise interestingly detailed facade. My standard is objective. To top an otherwise fine building with some generic volume is bad architecture--whatever value you might have gained by designing a decent facade like that of the seniors' housing is undermined by a part of the building that doesn't look like it was designed at all--the top.