Toronto Richmond Adelaide Centre: 120 & 130 Adelaide West Recladding | 136.85m | 35s | Oxford Properties | WZMH

The new cladding reduces the whole block to incoherent visual noise for me. Maybe it's just my aging eyes and poor depth perception, but I honestly can't make out the actual shape of the building when I'm standing at York & Adelaide; it's just reflections on reflections. I mean, maybe the architects are big fans of the end of Enter the Dragon, I dunno.
Honestly I’m 18 w perfect vision and I can’t tell a damn thing apart at this corner. Especially in pictures. Kinda unfortunate since they definitely could have gone w a color like black which would have made a world of difference.



I also don't like how it completely blends in with the EY building:

 
At the risk of getting called out for being a tasteless idiot, I will still say that this recladding looks better than what it replaced. Would I have liked to see anything other than blue-grey? Yes. Do I think that this is a missed opportunity for adding some sort of a vivid color to the skyline by using colored cladding? Yes. But still, it looks better now than what it looked before, so it gets my unenthusiastic thumbs up.
 
Between these buildings and the Bay Adelaide Centre, Adelaide is a bit too full of reflective sky-coloured glass. I find it disorienting as well. It's like the individual buildings are invisible.
 
“It looked better than it did before”. And this is why we get what we get. The bar set so low because the bar was set even lower for the existing design.
 
Probably that they want to compete with new buildings in the city rather than with 40 year old buildings with much lower market rents.

It's totally fair comment to criticize the manner in which they've gone about that, though.

I think it looks far worse than what it's replacing, and I've also seen lots of older buildings modernized without getting aesthetically worse (or at the very least more bland and generic) in the process.
 
I preferred what was there before but this could have been much worse. I am not that perturbed by it

Yeah, it's certainly not the end of the world, but to me it's a hallmark contributor to the continued trend towards the increasing banality of Toronto's architectural expression. As a friend visiting from London (UK) for the first time said the other day, when walking around Southcore and the Financial, "meh, it could be Dallas or wherever."

I'd like to aspire to better than Dallas.
 

Back
Top