Toronto U of T: Centre for Civilizations, Cultures, and Cities | 42.75m | 9s | U of T | DS + R

Metro:

I think Victoria College has a leasing arrangement with McKinsey that would see the building revert back to the college in what, 30 years?

So perhaps some sort of arrangement like that could work with ROM and U of T.

AoD
 
Hey, that would be a perfect solution. The ROM would get its money, the land would remain institutional and UofT could finally get rid of the horrid brick building behind the Planetarium and rebuild it (better, one would hope) fronting on to Queen's Park.

Myself, I don't find Edward Johnson *that* horrid for early 60s institutional. Though yes, maybe it (like its W campus contemporaries, eg. Sid Smith) could find itself prone to tweaking/rebuilding...
 
Virtually every room in Sid Smith is inadequate for what it's used for, and the southern half wastes a dreadful amount of space...it deserves complete replacement.
 
Yet somehow, Sid Smith's survived...and being Parkin, it's latently got quasi-heritage properties, too. (Though all the alterations over the past decade and more have made a hash out of that, so yes, at this rate they might as well rip down and start anew. Maybe if anything's saved for "heritage" reasons, it might be the office block, which still looks and feels and functions much like it always has...)
 
Most of the office block doesn't function well, though. Sid Smith is overutilized - they'd need to temporarily relocate the entire faculty of arts & sciences for Sid Smith to be rebuilt, and that's somewhat impossible.
 
Whatever its architectural merits, I'll say this much about Sid Smith: it's the one building in Toronto that can make *anyone* sympathize, or at least empathize, with the fashionable 80s Postmodern critique of "decorated diagram" Modernism. Even after all its recent makeovering, it's just *that* hilariously c1960 Dreary Crew Cut Conformist, to the point where it constitutes a sort of perverse anti-appeal.

Though that's all off topic re this thread.
 
From Torontoist...

Sirrah McLaughlin

Here's what the theatre now looks like!

romplanetarium_4_01.jpg

romplanetarium_4_02.jpg
 
I agree with some of the comments left after that article--use this site as a PLANETARIUM! Tear it down and start again if you must, or even build a condo on top of the planetarium, but we should have a planetarium here, a public use, not condos.
 
http://www.thegridto.com/city/places/mclaughlin-planetarium/

What will become of the McLaughlin Planetarium?

With the Royal Ontario Museum's lease on the iconic, domed building running out in 2014, the race is on to save one of Toronto's most recognizable—and sorely under-utilized—structures the from radical redevelopment.

BY: DAVID TOPPING
WED FEB 8, 2012


The planetarium, once “a proud appendage of the ROM,” as the Star‘s Martin Knelman put it, closed to the public in October 1995 and, by 2008, it was being used as storage and office space for the museum. When the University of Toronto purchased the McLaughlin grounds from the ROM in January 2009, they leased the space back to the museum until March 31, 2014. By then, the idea was, they’d have some plan for what to do with it. But as of right now, says U of T spokesperson Laurie Stephens, they still don’t: There’s no developer, and no plan beyond eventually using the grounds “for academic and institutional purposes.” (That, at least, means no 46-storey condo tower like the one featured in the ROM’s widely panned 2005 plans for the site. Or, as Stephens puts it, “institutional and academic purposes are not expected to include residential uses for non-students.”)

If Planetarium Toronto can’t prevent the McLaughlin Planetarium from being demolished, they’ll push for one like it elsewhere in the city. In the mid-2000s, Kuntz was a board member of the GeoSpace Planetarium group (chaired by CBC Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald), which had a $150-million plan to “build a greenhouse facility on the waterfront that houses a star theatre alongside commercial retail space,” according to a Globe and Mail article from the time. But those plans were fizzling by the time the McLaughlin changed hands, and, given how complicated moving the ROM out once and for all will be, 2012 could well be the decisive year for the Planetarium. ”If we’re going to be moved out by the end of March 2014,” explains Brian McCrady, the ROM’s Vice-President of Facilities, “we will start packing in 2013. At a minimum, it’s about a year process to package, catalogue and move [everything].” The ROM is waiting on U of T’s word.
 
Maybe not by 2014 but at some point the ROM will need to expand. Why not just maintain this site for that purpose. It seems short-sighted to rush to develop it.
 
Tewder:

The ROM might be better of splitting off into two different sites - one for natural history and the other for cultural history.

AoD
 
Yes, true enough... I feel the AGO could split in this way too, into an AGO and an AGO-Modern. In my fantasy version of Toronto the Canada Malting Silos on the waterfront would have housed just such an expansion.
 

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