Can't disagree with that, @Skyhighzz. However, cultural change (and a growing appreciation/acceptance for quality, finesse, etc.) is inevitably and necessarily incremental.

Right, but it can't be denied that the behaviour of developers, consumers, policymakers, etc. is really just a reflection of ourselves and what our collective metropolitan/national culture upholds or fails to uphold.

Need I mention Daniels, Canderel, Concord, et al. (and YC, City of the Arts, Nobu, et al.) to prove the point that a good share of Toronto's developers exhibit hardly a modicum of civic pride as they erect one cheap spandrel heap after another in the centre of the largest city of a G20 nation...

Canadian tall-poppy syndrome epitomized. Cutting down excellence, rather than championing it, has been part and parcel of our cultural DNA since time immemorial.

Insipid, janky trash. Tasteless and without a trace of aesthetic or material dignity. I'm looking forward to the day when this flimsy charcoal spreadsheet pile fulfills it's well-deserved fate by peeling off and shattering (not into passerby pedestrians, let's hope).

An Aqualuna-wannabe design gesture pasted on a cheap back-painted window-wall box with exposed spreadsheet gridlines. Desperate pig-lipsticking.

This will cement Giannone Petricone's reputation as one of the new(er) rising stars in Toronto residential architecture, with its evolving design language of bold colours and sleek materials as an empathic counter-thesis against the status quo of grey cheapness.

Equally pathetic is the notion that "the suburbs" are somehow less deserving of competent (let alone high-calibre) architecture worthy of a major global metropolis by virtue of being hidden away from the world's limelight. Lack of civic pride has long been a sore point in Toronto's cultural DNA.

The calibre of design and fine-grained attention to shape, colour, and texture we're getting here are nothing short of world-class. Something that will truly elevate the culture of architecture and development in this historically parsimonious and timid city.

Appreciate the effort at non-spandrel solid panelling but that dark charcoal grey could not be more soulless and dreadful.

This will be quite a spandrel-y nightmare, going by the renders.

Totally agree. Even "well-executed" glass-boxes à la architectsAlliance that use sleek curtain wall with minimal cheap grey spandrel are, by this point, rather tired and passé. This city is begging for warm, reddish earth tones that are an antidote to infinite greyness.

We talk a lot about grey spandrel on this site, but crudely painted-over brick is an aesthetic vulgarity in its own right.

@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...

The Sugar Wharf towers are certainly a step above the trashy spandrel cheapness of Daniels Waterfront but that "crystalline" balcony pattern is quite tacky in its own right.

What a welcome antidote to Toronto's classic colour-aversion. This is shaping up spectacularly.

Trash materials, trash design.

That solid non-spandrel paneling and atypical use of colour is refreshing.

The out-of-place aesthetic cheapness of the unfortunate unclad raw concrete pillars are the only letdown in what's otherwise such a stunning and polished project. Should have been wrapped in something stone-like or metallic.

Aesthetic and civic atrocity.