There are too many design gestures on the exterior. The end up weakly competing with each other with non of them really winning.
There's some colour… but not enough to make the buildings colourful.
The two-floor notches are pronounced, yet they're undercut by the balconies which run through them at points.
There a semi-interesting diagonal mullions at the corners, but they could be eye-catching if they were far more pronounced. (They'd work if they were more like frames than mullions.)
The extending and retreating balconies are pretty neat, but can only made out from a select few angles. (I agree with Khristopher that they'd work much better if the rest of the exterior followed that plan.)
There may be a couple of other gestures I'm missing from that list, but no building needs four different things going on, let alone more. I think each gesture is interesting conceptually, but each of them leave me wanting more, so that they could actually make an impact, while wanting less or none of the others on that same building.
I don't think this makes Studio a disaster or failure at all, it's just not as concise a design as it could have been. The two-floor notches are still unique, and they mostly work, and they will make the buildings identifiable from both up close and from a distance… and that's worth something. The completion of the street wall on Richmond on that block is a huge win. I hope the OCAD U art gallery is finished well and does good things for both the school and for animation of the street. It'll be good for the area to have a thousand more people living on that block.
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