Toronto Theatre Park | 156.96m | 47s | Lamb Dev Corp | a—A

Original RTH renderings as requested:

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CGM said:
This precedent logic gets under my skin. The city needs to grow some... and the OMB's authority needs to be re-worked.
Why should we be obligated/pressured? The city needs to be able to reflect and make changes as it deems necessary. Forcing the city to repeat its mistakes showcases the lunacy we have to deal with.
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I wasn't suggesting it is a great process, just clarifying what the current situation is. Also the OMB's authority was extensively re-worked a couple years ago in the Planning and Conservation Land Statute Law Amendment Act (Bill 51).
 
Automation, you're not the first person to ask if a building has to be 100 years old, but no, that is not the case. In fact, the McKinsey & Co building on Charles West was recently added to the Inventory of Heritage Properties - it is less than 10 years old.

I've always felt that the even the name "Heritage Properties Inventory" is unfortunate, and that we should really have a "Protected buildings inventory", and that one class of buildings should be "Heritage". The good news is that as Heritage Conservation Districts are created, the list becomes less and less a list of "nice old buildings" and more and more a list of "buildings of interest". I'd love to see Toronto take it to the next step though.
 
Mike in TO said:
I wasn't suggesting it is a great process, just clarifying what the current situation is. Also the OMB's authority was extensively re-worked a couple years ago in the Planning and Conservation Land Statute Law Amendment Act (Bill 51).
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I know you were not suggestion, and my comments were not directed at you. There seems to be a "precedent" mindset at City Hall and OMB and it's pissing me off :)
 
We live with precedents in all aspects of life. Society functions based on them. I'm typing this in English because of a precedent. You can't live without precedents. It would be best to try to get over them!

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interchange42 answered first, but without following precedents, what would we have? Anarchy? Excessive following of precedents leads to stagnation, but not following them enough is just as destructive.

In this case (Toronto built form), disregarding precedents would result in the effective destruction of the city zoning bylaws. Instances like propane tank farms located in the middle of residential districts would be commonplace (and we all know why that is a bad idea). One of the main themes on this board is people complaining that a given 40-storey proposed building does not belong on a particular street. This would happen far more often if there were no controls on what gets built where.

Where there is room for debate is how tightly a given precedent should be followed -- in this case, how tall a proposed building in the Entertainment District can be and still be said to follow the precedent of the TIFF/Lightbox tower. Do we strictly limit the height to that of Lightbox, or does its precedent simply mean that tall towers (of unspecified height) are now allowable? Or is it not a precedent at all, but an isolated exception?
 
Thanks for posting images of the RTH model, Mike in TO. It appears that we weren't only cheated out of Erickson's full design for the Hall. The second image indicates that we didn't get the small plaza at the north-east corner of the site, or the broad walkway along King. How do we quantify their absence? Are the pedestrians of our city worse off for not getting them? We didn't get the lay-bys on Simcoe either.

I agree with Project End that towers-on-podiums are the new towers-in-the-park. Each age has its own way of doing things and the design vernacular evolves. The question is how well it is done; the best examples we produce will be treasured by future generations, and are our legacy.
 
Archivist said:
Automation, you're not the first person to ask if a building has to be 100 years old, but no, that is not the case. In fact, the McKinsey & Co building on Charles West was recently added to the Inventory of Heritage Properties - it is less than 10 years old.

I've always felt that the even the name "Heritage Properties Inventory" is unfortunate, and that we should really have a "Protected buildings inventory", and that one class of buildings should be "Heritage". The good news is that as Heritage Conservation Districts are created, the list becomes less and less a list of "nice old buildings" and more and more a list of "buildings of interest". I'd love to see Toronto take it to the next step though.
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Thanks for the info.
 
Mongo said:
Where there is room for debate is how tightly a given precedent should be followed -- in this case, how tall a proposed building in the Entertainment District can be and still be said to follow the precedent of the TIFF/Lightbox tower. Do we strictly limit the height to that of Lightbox, or does its precedent simply mean that tall towers (of unspecified height) are now allowable?
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And that is my point. We need to reflect, re-evaluate and make decisions that are sound... "precedent" must not even be a factor (as it seems to be now) if it is unfavourable.
 
You're talking about a lot of upheaval to the system if you are planning to deny a permit to developer U to build project U, when developer X was already given a permit to build similar project X.

In such a system, why would any developer stick their neck out and propose a development that could potentially cost them vast sums leading up to the approval stage only to find that they were not being granted approval?

With precedents determining how things happen they can see that as project X got built, they can go ahead and invest in project U and expect that it will be approved too. Without following precedents everything is a crap shoot - no one would throw any money at anything if they were not certain to a degree of a return.

Why would you propose running an urban development system that ignores precedents when everything else functions based on them?

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