jmi22 said:
Oooooomyyyyygodddddd. Seems the city is pining for urban design AND heritage powers to be taken out of their hands.
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Exactly what urban design powers does the city have? Contrary to the belief of most of this forum, the city has no ability to refuse anything on the basis of design/architecture. Unless you mean roads and are suggesting that the city deserves to lose control of planning how we arrange our streets for the crime of wanting bike lanes so people don't get killed. How awful of them.
 
70Challenger said:
Good! Toronto has already lost so much of its pre-war historical fabric that every remaining example is worth preserving
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Toronto is probably the most intact prewar city in North America. Almost the entire fabric of the city built pre-1940 is still there. (Mostly houses.) Should we now save those tens of thousands of buildings forever?

I don’t have a strong take on this project, but would the city really be better off with a façadectomy here?
 
AlexBozikovic said:
Toronto is probably the most intact prewar city in North America. Almost the entire fabric of the city built pre-1940 is still there. (Mostly houses.) Should we now save those tens of thousands of buildings forever?

I don’t have a strong take on this project, but would the city really be better off with a façadectomy here?
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Until Toronto developers demonstrate they are capable of building a street frontage with human scale, materiality and visual interest then yes, every pre-war facade should be saved. Post-war ones too if they meet that criteria. Also, most intact? Look at old photos of the city, it's hardly recognizeable, especially downtown.
 
From what I recall of the last proceeding there was an image circulated of how a new development could incorporate portions of the designated properties. Obviously it would be for a much smaller structure and of no interest to the developer who would benefit from a clean sweep.

The gist of heritage claim against the designated house is that there are others like it in the city. The argument against that view is that there no more in the King-Spadina area - which has its own heritage plan and which has lost a significant number of the original buildings from before 2000.

As this is not a proposal for a residential building, it will be interesting to see where the pressure is to remove a heritage structure for a hotel. Clearly the earlier small office proposal isn't coming back for a while, and there are already a number of significant but dormant commercial proposals for this block.
 
argus said:
As this is not a proposal for a residential building, it will be interesting to see where the pressure is to remove a heritage structure for a hotel.
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There are also plans in for at least three other hotels in the area, plus the Ace hotel, so there may not be much need for yet another hotel.
 
70Challenger said:
Also, most intact? Look at old photos of the city, it's hardly recognizeable, especially downtown.
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Yes, in fact. This 2003 map from city planning gives a sense: everything yellow and orange is pre-1915, and red is 1915-1930.

The narrative that Toronto lost many important buildings dates to the early 1970s. William Dendy’s Lost Toronto (1978) focuses on commercial and institutional buildings and mansions in the downtown core. Some were demolished as early as 1900.

To oversimplify, Toronto post-1945 demolished most of the financial district, Regent Park, Moss Park and St. James Town. Everything else is basically intact.

That “everything else” is houses. Most of the city is and has always been houses.

The preservation movement of the 1970s was not interested in individual houses like the ones on Adelaide. The idea of preserving those row houses would have been seen as ridiculous in 1975.There has been a dramatic expansion of what we consider heritage and the degree to which the city attempts to protect it.

In King Spadina, city Heritage Preservation Services is de facto using heritage as a tool of urban design.

Make of that what you will, but this is not a simple story.


IMG_9739.jpeg
 
I have to say, as much as I'm taken with the idea of saving or reconstructing high quality heritage, these particular buildings, in this particular context don't greatly move me. I don't find the quality
or beauty noteworthy, and the context on that section of Adelaide isn't all that heritage in vibe.

I'm more concerned here that the replacement proposal is simply bad development. Its ugly, the podium is wrong, the relationship to the adjacent properties is off etc.

I would prefer not to see heritage used as the tool to address ham-fisted developers and architects who just don't get how to do podiums in this town, but I do get the temptation absent better tools.

Heritage may beg to differ with my characterization here......
 
AlexBozikovic said:
To oversimplify, Toronto post-1945 demolished most of the financial district, Regent Park, Moss Park and St. James Town. Everything else is basically intact.
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That's more than an oversimplification, it's an over-reach.

The St. Lawrence/Old Town Neighbourhood is more new than old. If we're looking at Yonge to Parliament and the railway to Richmond or Queen....

It's not just the Board of Trade/TTC building at Yonge/Front we lost, a straight walk out Front shows an area that should be our heritage centre piece (outside of the signature buildings we lost in the Financial District).....
is littered with stuff like the St. Lawrence Centre for the arts, the Condos on the east side of Jarvis opposite the St. Lawrence Market, the Time and Space nonsense from Pemberton and so much more.

Saying it's intact simply isn't right. Now, some of the replacement architecture along the Esplanade, or at Market Square could reasonably be said to be context sensitive and generally somewhere between appreciated and inoffensive, but it
certainly isn't the history that was once there. (let me acknowledge here, that many of the current buildings replaced parking lots, and that better quality heritage was often lost decades earlier)

I noted above, I'm not particularly keen on the 'heritage' here, and don't really have an inherent problem w/losing it at this point, save and except for the current proposal being a clunker.

That, however, doesn't change the reality that what most people want is to see the best of 'vibe' they like about an area preserved. Most aren't tied to the interiors of buildings, unless they were particularly grand, and well preserved.

The desire is to keep the area similar in 'feel' as they walk along the street. Simple use of scale and material at the podium level addresses much of this, it could be pastiche, but it needn't be. The Ace Hotel being a great example.

In general if you can address the podium; then you can produce a fairly modern tower in behind as long as you can tuck it back enough that it doesn't visually intrude at street level; alternatively you can try to build a tower with higher quality materials, I might off The Selby as a good choice.

That doesn't mean there isn't a place for modern architecture. Just not on every block or in every neighbourhood.

Let me blow up a section of the map above. Remember green/blue is contemporary architecture.

1750853249036.png
 
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