Collingwoodbuildinglover
Active Member
I'm hoping when the podium gets finished. It will dull down the white. Not a big fan of the scattered white spandrels
- Thread starter Marcanadian
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DSC
Superstar
Somewhat puzzling why the Hokkaido Ramen building's owners did not sell - they clearly gave permission for an overhand but they can never rebuild (higher).
citylights
New Member
cityspace
New Member
Highly subjective i know but name a section of major street in TO that is not potentially mind-alteringly depressing. The pics above are significantly better than the gritty sterile TO I encountered in the early 2000s.
biospherian
Active Member
As someone studying urban planning, I'm trying to figure out for myself why TO streets look infinitely more depressing than Vancouver despite the building architecture being relatively similar to each other.
And I'm starting to think it has to do with a combination of landscape architecture + and street-level design.
Large areas of downtown Van are master-planned, which acts as a guide for developers who try to match their designs with the existing city-guided environmental design standards in the vicinity.
This provides consistency, and a minimum standard of quality expected for new projects in the city.
Vancouver also often makes the developer completely redo the pavement even if they aren't in that bad of a condition.
Additionally, much more quality is invested into the 2~3 levels of podium design in Vancouver compared to their tower designs, with an emphasis on the pedestrian street-level experience.
In contrast, condo projects in Toronto often employ the same monotonous design from the lower levels to the tower up top,
and it almost feels like retail is shoe-horned into that platform, instead of the podium being designed with business and pedestrians in mind.
Landscape design is mostly abysmal, as you often don't expect more from a Toronto project other than just a few half-dead, slow-growing trees being planted at the edge of the street.
Some examples in Vancouver:
2014:
2023:
2014:
2023:
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cityspace
New Member
Sadly it is not just landscape architecture and street level design, although they go a very long way, almost completely concealing any natural geographical weaknesses. Vancouver has way more natural beauty that TO just can't compete with. An element that comes to mind as an example is freeze-thaw weathering here. Each freezing event causes damage to Toronto streets which is in large part why they look and feel horrendous and out of a third word country. Consider that our undrivable Swiss cheese roads cover almost a quarter of the total city area. Just the road pavement alone, if redone all over TO, can significantly alleviate our god given sufferings.
biospherian
Active Member
Yes, road pavement + a minimal amount of effort put into maintaining sidewalks will improve the aesthetics a lot.
This is evident when you compare Bloor Street vs downtown Yonge Street.
While we can't compete with Vancouver's natural beauty, Bloor Street suggests that Toronto can find its own character.
Another thing that makes Bloor Street so much more aesthetically pleasing than most other streets in Toronto is its lack of power lines.
If you removed and buried all the power lines along King and Queen (from the 1800s for god's sake) they would look so much better.
And it's why I'm obsessing over the fact that this city does nothing to encourage power lines to be buried.
With all due respect, I think Toronto's natural geography is just an excuse, and I think we can do better to put actual effort in beautifying the city.
Vancouver has been asking developers to beautify its alleyways and bury their infamous H-frame power lines throughout the city whenever there's nearby development:
Past:
Present:
Past:
Present:
2022:
2023: Hydro poles completely removed as part of city plan
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DarwinP
Active Member
Examples of how Vancouver gets it while Toronto continues to be the city of the bare minimum. Forget about excellence, we could at least do decent, but instead we do bare minimum.
biospherian
Active Member
That's what I don't get. We're not a 2nd tier city. We should be setting examples.
Instead, aesthetically we're simply planting concrete bars into the ground and expecting people to live in them,
while doing the bare minimum to improve the shared space for the people interacting with that environment.
The bad news is that it will stay this way because nobody cares. For most, there's no reason to improve a city that's meant to live and work in and spend your vacation elsewhere.
maestro
Senior Member
There appears to be emphasis on unique bold ground level design and landscaping in Vancouver. Sometimes the end result is a confused architectural statement.That takes space to accomplish successfully. There's more terracing on taller projects or spacing between taller buildings which contributes to the ambiance at street level. In Toronto, developer are getting away with squeezing as much square footage in the lower levels as possible. Then there are agencies like the TTC that selected a dull grey, utilitarian solid core pole as there main support for their above ground electrical system. The grey utilitarian solid core doesn't provide space to conceal any wires internally. Wires connecting to traffic signals sharing the pole have to be strapped onto the outside.
Then there is Montreal which is outclassing Vancouver right now.
Then there is Montreal which is outclassing Vancouver right now.
isaidso
Senior Member
The longer I live in Toronto (been here 23 years now), the more I'm convinced that it's rooted in the culture and perpetuated by a stubborn adherence to the status quo.
People forget that Toronto's transformation into a global metropolis is VERY recent. For most of Toronto's history, the city was an industrial blue collar city where pragmatism ruled the day. As long as it functioned and was cheap, that's all that mattered. Design, beauty, luxury, refinement were not only aggressively stamped out but often ridiculed as excessive, wasteful, and unimportant. This sort of backlash still happens in Toronto all the time.
A lot of Torontonians are so used to how things are that don't think it can be any other way. You literally have to show them photos from other world cities to prove that there are alternatives to concrete sidewalks and overhead electrical, colours beyond grey, and how a simple thing like landscaping and the removal of car lanes can drastically improve a city.
At the very least, people explain it away with 'well it's nicer than it was' as if that now means the problem has been solved OR 'it's depressing because it's January'. Shouldn't grey January days mean it's doubly important that we pay attention to design?
Some times the pushback is extreme. I remember criticizing the sorry state of a block of Queen West and called for restoration/improvements to its public realm.. A long time UT member called me a Toronto basher and said I have no place on this site. Many Torontonians not only think everything looks fine but will denounce anyone who says otherwise.
The conclusion? Toronto can absolutely be a gorgeous city but it requires a complete cultural shift. Sadly, it takes generations to change a culture and the city is excruciatingly timid.. Even a relatively simple thing like pedestrianizing the downtown section of Yonge will likely take half a century and 3-4 overhauls before it gets done properly. They'll do 3 blocks, rip it out 15 years later because it's not anywhere nice enough, Rebuild it and expand it. Rip that out 15 years later, Rebuild and expand it. Etc.
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Northern Light
Superstar
Just a suggestion, we have sections of the forum devoted to public realm at large and in Toronto; perhaps the above discussion could be more appropriately placed as it has very little to do with this site.
Northern Light
Superstar
Now, I was down here yesterday, and I have photos from January 29th, 2024 to share:
telefann
Active Member
@isaidso I've read many of your posts and a lot of our views happen to align. This is something I've always been baffled by, though: in the Canadian context, I can understand that Montreal has a stronger cultural propensity to embrace design, refinement, and sophistication than Toronto as it has a far longer/deeper history rooted in old-world Franco-European heritage and was, for many years, the dominant centre of the country.
What would explain the fact that a somewhat higher level of attention to refinement in Vancouver though? I was there for a trip a year ago and immediately stepping off the plane into YVR (and later confirmed as I was walking/driving around the city core and various parks/attractions) I could sense a general finesse and desire for aesthetic excellence of a noticeably different calibre from Toronto, even if, granted, they had their fair share of spandrel-condos and other urbanistic imperfections. In simplistic layman terms, there was something about the place that just felt more "world-class", which is kind of ironic considering that they were never at the top of the Canadian metropolitan pecking order (though, it might be added, they have hosted both a World Expo and an Olympics which we certainly haven't). And let's not forget that Vancouver is an even newer city than Toronto in some respects and was established as a sizable settlement only in the late-ish 19th century?
