I'm just being rational. Toronto is a growing city. It's not a museum piece in a climate controlled environment. Things will be lost. There is quality in everything however, some things are better than others. Right now there's such an appreciation for prewar architecture. You can deny it but, it does come at the cost of better quality modern era design. It's human nature to prop up one thing at the expense of another. I'm not in favour of reclads (in particular this one) but, they are a fact of life. Everything has a life span. I'd rather 120 be preserved if it means sacrificing 130. Good luck getting both.
You're still not getting what I'm getting at.
And what I'm getting at is that the general tendency through history in terms of "recognition" has been that once one hitherto unfashionable style or period has been "rediscovered"--Victorian, Edwardian, Art Deco, et al--it has *not* been accompanied by a not-everything-previous-is-superior counter-reflex re preceding styles. In fact, in practice the scope has *continued* to expand re what's "worthy" in those previous styles, even as the overall timeframe of "heritage validity" moves forward--which of course, brings us to contentious Stollerys-type situations; but still, that, too, reflects the reality of that natural "expanding scope" condition. Likewise re the UT Miscellany/Evocative Images UT photo threads, or Vintage Toronto on Facebook; you'll find that the reactions and discussions hook more on "gee whiz that's interesting" than "good riddance to obsolete rubbish". Sometimes the laments over lost-past or inferior-present get overwrought; but that's the way it is--post something old, a "then" as opposed to a "now" (or alongside, for comparison purposes), and people engage. And the engagement's probably more in-depth than it might have been, say, 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. Look: even if the TD Centre is universally hailed now, it hasn't stopped even the Mies-sympathetic among us from continuing to regret the demolition of the old Bank of Toronto--and not only that, but our present-day expanded scope even allows us to "appreciate" a lot of the battered, begrimed, and then-ignored lesser urban elements that constituted the TD parcel (warehouses on Wellington, Georgian-style shops/townhouses along King). Likewise with the demolition of the entire W side of Yonge as well as the entire Eaton retail/warehouse ensemble for the Eaton Centre; somehow, through revisiting the photographic record, the enormity and the totality of destruction galls even more today than it did in the 70s--and yet this all exists alongside a conciliatory "heritage appreciation" of the Eaton Centre itself which regrets the removal or bowdlerization of the original 70s Zeidler aesthetic. Yeah, it's all a bag full of paradoxes; but hey, it's fun.
So in light of that,
what's this business about "I think people will come around to the notion that not everything pre-war is vastly superior to modern era designs"?!? That's going the other direction from the tableau I'm describing--and it sounds to me less reflective of a trend than of a certain parallel/alternate vested-interest mindset that's *always* existed. Or if it *is* a trend, if anything *has* shifted, it might have more to do with fewer families these days choosing to have Toronto history on their coffee tables or bookshelves, and a younger geek/fanboy cohort conditioned by ooh-aah skyscraper/starchitecture websites and message boards which tend to be heavily fixated on the new at the expense of the old.
"You can deny it but, it does come at the cost of better quality modern era design."?
Big. Freaking. Deal. (Though it does validate my past contention that there's a "mindset gap" btw/ those who arrived at UT from a new-construction-and-development end, and those who arrived from a preexisting-conditions end.)
The Mcmansioning neighbourhoods are a different story. Most of those facades are masonry that still have life in them or can be repaired with, tuckpointing, new/old brick or, flipping the brick around. It's unrelated to what is happening at 401 Bay. The facade there can't be repaired. The panels are so much larger and heavier that it can't be easily removed or replaced without completely blowing the bank.
Uh, actually, the core reasoning/mentality behind most McMansion rebuilds runs a little deeper than what a little token façade-retention can do--and is really not that much different from those poor poor landlords who *really* *really* have to do these unsympathetic reclads lest they completely blow the bank. And oftentime, I'll betcha, said landlords or the clients they're serving/hoping to serve/informed by are, well, themselves the McMansion-rebuild class, such is how things are in the Toronto of 2017. Myopia begets myopia, IOW.
I also get the impression that forumers aren't aware of all the previous reclads undertaken in Toronto and probably now mistake them as original. Urbantoronto was started around two large reclads in the Mackenzie Building (now State Street Financial Centre) and the DBRS Tower complex (originally two different looking towers). I just find it interesting.
Oh, I know those cases. Not suggesting what was done there ought to be models, though--lessons to be learned from, maybe. (Though the DBRS towers actually weren't as "different looking" as 120-130 Adelaide--it only seemed that way because the earlier one sat on a wraparound podium and the later one had a cutaway ground level entrance; but they were both mirrored cubes. And re your earlier-in-this-thread invocation of Prudential: that was a re-windowing, not a recladding. It's not the same with brick-clad Art Deco as it is with Modernist curtain walling/panelling.)