I'm sure I shall get buried for these views, but this is how I see it
This is a building that I have a love-hate relationship.
On the positive end, it seems that Peter Clewes got it all right, if his goal was to create a Miesian-style building with all the master's subtleties in tact: the building has great detailing, subtlely balanced yet vertically assertive in a sleek way. This does everything a well-designed Miesian building should do but ... it starts to fizzle and go flat.
Methinks this building is too respectful. There is little dialogue with the past, but more of a well-rehearsed rote. He does some interesting things with the base, but those things are so slight that they can be easily missed. This is technically neo-modernist on the highest level, since it is created after the decline of postmodernism, but in my world X Condominiums is just a modernist building that does not deserve that neo-prefix.
Afterall, it could have been created in the time of Mies van der Rohe. If it were not identified as being from the hands of Peter Clewes, no one could be blamed for thinking it came from Mies or an associate or a Mies student from that time. The only way I can suggest what I think this building needed, would be to take you to another architect who would have respected Mies but also challenged at the same time.
Helmut Jahn is the achitect whom I am thinking about in this role. He would have provided the dialogue with Mies without shouting or screaming in his design. Jahn did his tracing when he came out of Illinois Institute of Technology, and started working for C. F. Murphy and Associates. But then he started to explore more colour, pattern and levels of transparency in glass. He experimented with asymmetry, planar cuts, rounded edges, etc, that informed his own emerging style. You can still see the Miesian influence, but you can also experience the dramatic change and updating and personalizing.
If you don't like Jahn, insert someone who is a neo-Miesian, or better yet a Peter Clewes willing to challenge himself to be bolder - bold enough to create a dialogue with the master whom he obviously respects.
Both Robert Stern and Peter Clewes create well thought out buildings, and I don't think Clewes is a distraction like Stern to the long term balancing out of modern architecture with other styles in Toronto's skyscraper pipeline. But this effort, without needing to be outrageous, could have been a great deal more.
At minimum, this building provides an alternative for those who want good, well designed, modernist architecture that competes with the high-end faux-historicism of Stern. Yet the goal should have been set higher than this, and it wasn't.
