Toronto Pinnacle on Adelaide | 144.47m | 46s | Pinnacle | Hariri Pontarini

YES! Another featureless glass box to add to our city's ample collection! Great to see T.O. architects staying true to their tradition of care-taking for our city's built environment as they continue produce groundbreakingly generic buildings like this. We can all be proud to live in a place where our architects and developers dream up delightful window-wall towers that will be enjoyed by generations to come.

As Winston Churchill famously said: "First we shape our buildings and then they shape us." Glad to see the architects of hariri Pontarini are taking their roles so seriously.
 
Has retail and increases density. It's also not an 'ugly' building but it won't be a landmark in Toronto architecture.

But I will say that I would like to see more 'thoughtful' designs in TO.
 
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When, in their large scale projects, HP try to disguise the humble Toronto box as something else ( that rather grand thing at Yonge and Bloor, for instance ... ) things tend to get a bit silly, so it's nice to see them embrace the gloriously rectilinear for what it is.
 
UrbanFervour said:
YES! Another featureless glass box to add to our city's ample collection! Great to see T.O. architects staying true to their tradition of care-taking for our city's built environment as they continue produce groundbreakingly generic buildings like this. We can all be proud to live in a place where our architects and developers dream up delightful window-wall towers that will be enjoyed by generations to come.

As Winston Churchill famously said: "First we shape our buildings and then they shape us." Glad to see the architects of hariri Pontarini are taking their roles so seriously.
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Given what you said along with that quote, I fear the lack of sophistication with which you interpret the way architecture shapes us. Boxy, simple, functional buildings don't shape us into square, boring people. There is a psychology built into architecture, for example, if the layouts are positive and reflect well on its residents to make them feel relaxed at home, happy, bright... then that's a success.

If you don't like "boxy", simple glass towers, then that's your own tastes speaking and nothing else.
 
There is some validity in that far too many of our new buildings are just variations of boxes with glass and it's really starting to looking boring.

We don't put any creatively into our buildings for the most part in this city and others elsewhere and it's a crying shame. All that incredible design of previous generations of buildings and all we can build now are clones of box glass towers? Our culture is all about producing mediocre now and it shows everywhere.

It's all so bland and dull.
 
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UrbanFervour said:
Great to see T.O. architects staying true to their tradition of care-taking for our city's built environment as they continue produce groundbreakingly generic buildings like this.
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As Winston Churchill famously said: "First we shape our buildings and then they shape us." Glad to see the architects of hariri Pontarini are taking their roles so seriously.
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Urban Shocker said:
When, in their large scale projects, HP try to disguise the humble Toronto box as something else ( that rather grand thing at Yonge and Bloor, for instance ... ) things tend to get a bit silly, so it's nice to see them embrace the gloriously rectilinear for what it is.
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So, it's Hariri Pontarini with the final say over what gets built?

Final responsibility lies with the developer. You both make it sound like the developers will just build whatever the architects design for them with no input on the process. In the end the developer pays the bills, and the developer may have started out with grander plans, but before everything is costed it's all just conceptual. At Bloor Yonge Great Gulf told HP they wanted something that would stand out, and HP delivered that. If the canted walls really have gone from this project (it's tough to see exactly what is going on with that render - UT will endeavour to get some higher res stuff for P on A), then it's only because Pinnacle wanted them gone for whatever reason.

And the inference that HP have sold out their integrity is tiresome: architectural firms spend a huge amount of time creating these plans and use expensive equipment. It all takes money to happen, and the green flows when the developer is happy.

42
 
tkip said:
There is some validity in that far too many of our new buildings are just variations of boxes with glass and it's really starting to looking boring.

We don't put any creatively into our buildings for the most part in this city and others elsewhere and it's a crying shame. All that incredible design of previous generations of buildings and all we can build now are clones of box glass towers? Our culture is all about producing mediocre now and it shows everywhere.

It's all so bland and dull.
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Plenty of thought goes into some "boxes". There are good boxes and bad boxes. But to say that any boxy building is a clone with little thought put into it... well, I just can't take that argument seriously.
 
In the end though, we still end up with boxes. There's no imagination here. It's all been dumbed down.

Plenty of people on these forums constantly gripe about getting sick of seeing the same design over and over again and I tend to agree with them. There was a time when we actually built buildings with some actual thought and creatively put into design. I was taking the St Clair streetcar last week over to Yonge and overheard a conversation between some elderly people.

A couple was in town visiting family and another elderly lady was talking with them and at one point as we passed Avenue they began to admire the older buildings. And that's when it became interesting because the elderly lady and the others began to talk about the "new glass boxes" that were popping up everywhere. Namely condos.

They all joined in agreement that the newer towers lacked imagination, that most of them were just boring boxes that were just built to be functional. Their words. When people in their 70's having lived in the era of great architecture pan modern towers for looking bland and dull, you know something is up.

With the odd excpeption we don't build buildings that come anywhere near the design and greatness of previous generations because it's all come down to functionality and costs.
 
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Ramako said:
Here was the rendering on Hariri Pontarini's website:

joa_01.jpg




And here's the rendering on the website:

Pinnacle_2.jpg




It looks like the angled plane at the northeast corner has been removed and spandrel glass has been generously added. It's not clear from this angle, but it looks as though the entire tower may have been boxified. I think my expectations for this tower have just about hit the floor. Though, to be fair, I shouldn't have expected anything particularly interesting from Pinnacle in the first place.
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It looks like your standard 12 storey suburban apartment building stretched to 43 floors. Please somebody stop this!!
 
Exactly... A cheap window wall tacked onto a concrete structural frame contributes nothing to architecture or to our civic profile, especially on John Street which is supposed to become a centre of culture and entertainment.. Of course architects are responding to the demands of the clients, but at a certain point they are responsible for the window-wall clone-forest growing up in this city.

How refreshing to see someone like Ken Greenberg stand up good urban design when the other players in the Waterfront were ready to go cheap and expedient It's rare to see someone in Toronto stand up for the ideals of the design professions.

As for your comment, Spire, exposure to contemporary alternatives beyond the cheap crappy point towers routinely built in Toronto might change (or refine) your tastes as well?? I have no desire to live in CityPlace, AnyPlace.
 
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It does look a lot like something we'd see in CityPlace.

As for the argument about developer vs. architect. As Frank Gehry said, the cities need to give developers a reason to spend money on more quality (read: good design) projects.
 
interchange42 said:
So, it's Hariri Pontarini with the final say over what gets built?

Final responsibility lies with the developer. You both make it sound like the developers will just build whatever the architects design for them with no input on the process. In the end the developer pays the bills, and the developer may have started out with grander plans, but before everything is costed it's all just conceptual. At Bloor Yonge Great Gulf told HP they wanted something that would stand out, and HP delivered that. If the canted walls really have gone from this project (it's tough to see exactly what is going on with that render - UT will endeavour to get some higher res stuff for P on A), then it's only because Pinnacle wanted them gone for whatever reason.

And the inference that HP have sold out their integrity is tiresome: architectural firms spend a huge amount of time creating these plans and use expensive equipment. It all takes money to happen, and the green flows when the developer is happy.

42
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If the developer is inevitably going to dumb-down the design, then why hire an architect like HP in the first place? Why pay for a design if you have no real plans to execute it? I'd have thought that Pinnacle would rather cut to the chase by throwing a dart at the Page & Steele catalogue.
 
I think in the end we need to put this at the city's feet.

They should set some kind of standard for architectural design and instead we have developers and firms just putting up watered down and barely passable buildings that are just variations of the same theme over and over again. I thought we had some new desing review board. What happened to this? And it's not just Toronto.

All over the world, we're seeing more of the same looking buildings being built and skylines are looking more and more alike.
 
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