Toronto The Addison Residences | 49.9m | 16s | Adi | Core Architects

Man, that render makes this look so much cleaner than the actual elevations. Mullions everywhere, and this is all aluminum instead of precast. Kind of junky if you ask me.
 
I do think we go a little over-board with heritage sometimes, but I am not upset so long as we achieve various planning objectives.

By keeping these houses as facades, we will retain a pleasant human-scaled experience at ground-level for pedestrians, it breaks up the podium massing, and the interiors will allow for floorspace that can accommodate smaller retail businesses and/or restaurants, which satisfies me.
 
innsertnamehere said:
I'm fine with keeping these townhouses, but they should be commercial spaces, not residential. There is a neat little restaurant and retail scene turning up on Portland and this could have done a good job of expanding that.
Click to expand...

Really a shame that these look like they're going to be residential. I assumed they would be commercial and would continue to build on the pattern of other houses being converted into commercial, which like you say above is really creating quite a nice area on Portland.
 
In an alternate universe this may have been the design ;)

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At this point, those (very standard and banal) Victorians - as pretty and charming as they may be to some eyes - are what's out of context on that block. They lose all charm and meaning with new density awkwardly contorting around them like this project does - the new, necessary density compromises them beyond reason. Likewise, they compromise the design of the new midrise by dramatically impinging on what can be done in a site area that was tight to begin with. (Designing a ground level of a residential midrise building on a small property with requirements such as those pertaining to loading and parking entries is a daunting task that even great architects can struggle with.)

That first rendering a few posts up shows how ridiculous and uncomfortable the streetscape is. I don't know how anyone can consider this a positive approach to design. There are many cases I am all for keeping and respecting true heritage - and I mean truly, not just a facade - but this is actually just downright stupid. I wonder if in the future we'll compromise the design of new suburban developments (and their streetscapes) by forcing developers and architects to incoherently work their projects around non-noteworthy suburban houses from 1980s/1990s subdivisions.

I'm not trying to sound rude about it but I think about the incredible midrise streetscapes that European cities we love - which have evolved over time greatly - have produced. I think about Paris, or London, or Berlin, and then by contrast I remember just how ridiculous it is that we have these unconvincing re-creations of old, modest 2-storey homes tacked into our streetscapes with buildings doing strange gymnastics to exist around them. Imagine if we could just embrace urbanity and produce great streetscapes - reasonable streetwall with a nice scale, widened sidewalks, high quality streetscaping. We wouldn't rely on some strange notion of a Victorian home stripped of its garden and plopped uncomfortably between midrise and highrise buildings as though it's somehow a sophisticated response to a changing city or a way of "maintaining scale".

TL;DR ... You can rebuild as many existing 2 or 3-storey Victorian buildings as you wish, but that is not the scale a neighbourhood in the middle of 2020s downtown Toronto is ever going to evoke, particularly with new density awkwardly contorting around it. Create a good scale and feel - don't ask old Victorian houses to do it for you. Other recent examples of this mentality via older commercial streetscapes such as the IBI designed proposal around Queen and Mutual demonstrate an inability to work around these buildings meaningfully within new policy, and policy failing to produce desirable results. A century of change in Toronto, and it is decided that the ideal streetscape for Queen St. E. is the old datum of the 3-storey commercial buildings, just now with a point tower awkwardly popping out the top? Please spare us all from the knuckle-dragging. It makes us look like a backwater for thinking that's how great cities are made.

ChesterCopperpot said:
Sorry - but heritage consultants >>>>> your feelings
Click to expand...

If the results of Toronto's sort of bureaucratic urban-design game of chess are satisfactory to you, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it. But if you think that projects like this are seen universally by heritage consultants as examples of urban design success stories, I assure you, you are very mistaken. I would also argue that a lot of the "heritage consultant" work in this city is essentially acting as a hired gun for a developer or for the city's attempts to hold back development. I am also willing to bet that the heritage consultant - ERA or whoever it was for this project - probably saw this as laughable and just a necessary thing to secure in order to get the development moving forward. That's how "heritage consultants" talk to clients in boardrooms around this city a lot of the time - it's not because of a moral stance that these homes are meaningful architectural or cultural heritage. Colborne Lodge, in High Park? Absolutely. The Waterworks building on the park? Yes, it can be integrated and retain its meaning and its place in the city. These homes? Not a single chance.

This is what our city planning department does - they leverage old Victorian homes that are entirely unremarkable, as a way to hold back development applications. I am a big-government guy who believes in effective regulation and a heavy involvement in how we build cities. But the way we use ""heritage"" as a pawn in the process in Toronto - end result be damned - is misplaced and laughable, and an insult to true heritage preservation and urban design.
 
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I think those townhouses have character and should be preserved. At this rate in 10 years we won't have any left.
Thats part of the charm of the neighborhood people want to live here and visit in the first place
 
.dwg said:
At this point, those (very standard and banal) Victorians - as pretty and charming as they may be to some eyes - are what's out of context on that block. They lose all charm and meaning with new density awkwardly contorting around them like this project does - the new, necessary density compromises them beyond reason. Likewise, they compromise the design of the new midrise by dramatically impinging on what can be done in a site area that was tight to begin with. (Designing a ground level of a residential midrise building on a small property with requirements such as those pertaining to loading and parking entries is a daunting task that even great architects can struggle with.)

That first rendering a few posts up shows how ridiculous and uncomfortable the streetscape is. I don't know how anyone can consider this a positive approach to design. There are many cases I am all for keeping and respecting true heritage - and I mean truly, not just a facade - but this is actually just downright stupid. I wonder if in the future we'll compromise the design of new suburban developments (and their streetscapes) by forcing developers and architects to incoherently work their projects around non-noteworthy suburban houses from 1980s/1990s subdivisions.

I'm not trying to sound rude about it but I think about the incredible midrise streetscapes that European cities we love - which have evolved over time greatly - have produced. I think about Paris, or London, or Berlin, and then by contrast I remember just how ridiculous it is that we have these unconvincing re-creations of old, modest 2-storey homes tacked into our streetscapes with buildings doing strange gymnastics to exist around them. Imagine if we could just embrace urbanity and produce great streetscapes - reasonable streetwall with a nice scale, widened sidewalks, high quality streetscaping. We wouldn't rely on some strange notion of a Victorian home stripped of its garden and plopped uncomfortably between midrise and highrise buildings as though it's somehow a sophisticated response to a changing city or a way of "maintaining scale".

TL;DR ... You can rebuild as many existing 2 or 3-storey Victorian buildings as you wish, but that is not the scale a neighbourhood in the middle of 2020s downtown Toronto is ever going to evoke, particularly with new density awkwardly contorting around it. Create a good scale and feel - don't ask old Victorian houses to do it for you. Other recent examples of this mentality via older commercial streetscapes such as the IBI designed proposal around Queen and Mutual demonstrate an inability to work around these buildings meaningfully within new policy, and policy failing to produce desirable results. A century of change in Toronto, and it is decided that the ideal streetscape for Queen St. E. is the old datum of the 3-storey commercial buildings, just now with a point tower awkwardly popping out the top? Please spare us all from the knuckle-dragging. It makes us look like a backwater for thinking that's how great cities are made.



If the results of Toronto's sort of bureaucratic urban-design game of chess are satisfactory to you, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it. But if you think that projects like this are seen universally by heritage consultants as examples of urban design success stories, I assure you, you are very mistaken. I would also argue that a lot of the "heritage consultant" work in this city is essentially acting as a hired gun for a developer or for the city's attempts to hold back development. I am also willing to bet that the heritage consultant - ERA or whoever it was for this project - probably saw this as laughable and just a necessary thing to secure in order to get the development moving forward. That's how "heritage consultants" talk to clients in boardrooms around this city a lot of the time - it's not because of a moral stance that these homes are meaningful architectural or cultural heritage. Colborne Lodge, in High Park? Absolutely. The Waterworks building on the park? Yes, it can be integrated and retain its meaning and its place in the city. These homes? Not a single chance.

This is what our city planning department does - they leverage old Victorian homes that are entirely unremarkable, as a way to hold back development applications. I am a big-government guy who believes in effective regulation and a heavy involvement in how we build cities. But the way we use ""heritage"" as a pawn in the process in Toronto - end result be damned - is misplaced and laughable, and an insult to true heritage preservation and urban design.
Click to expand...
Can I nominate this as an early contender for post of the year? ?
 
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