[syn]

Dumpy "fear of height" blocks are so 1995.

Why do you keep repeating this?

It has nothing to do with a fear of heights.

 

[Hydrogen]

Maybe it's a fear of low heights?

 

[adma]

If anyone notices, hardly anyone, even those advocating 1995-style non-point-blocks, is speaking up on behalf of the condos'n'such which were actually built on the Distillery site in the 90s.

So again, maybe it's not a matter of "an appropriate location for tall buildings", but whether the Gooderham site was an appropriate location for condos, at all? This is something which really ought to have been addressed 15 years ago, before the first condos stuck their feet into the door...

 

[Urban Shocker]

Maybe few speak up for those rather apologetic buildings from the "fear of heights" era because they're not particularly attractive? Maybe aA's initiative ( their main innovation perhaps ) - to make multi-unit residential buildings something that the architectural design community is increasingly involved with - hadn't gathered enough momentum at the time they were built? Now all kinds of leading local architectural firms are involved in condo design, expanding from the position of a decade or more ago where they were mostly doing government and cultural buildings, community centres, and the occasional assisted housing complex. As the pervasiveness of developer culture's Cheddingtonista style declines, and standards of design are raised by the contemporary neo-Modernists, we'll notice the failings of such well-intentioned earlier precursors in the Distillery District.

 

[adma]

Maybe few speak up for those rather apologetic buildings from the "fear of heights" era because they're not particularly attractive? Maybe aA's initiative ( their main innovation perhaps ) - to make multi-unit residential buildings something that the architectural design community is increasingly involved with - hadn't gathered enough momentum at the time they were built? Now all kinds of leading local architectural firms are involved in condo design, expanding from the position of a decade or more ago where they were mostly doing government and cultural buildings, community centres, and the occasional assisted housing complex. As the pervasiveness of developer culture's Cheddingtonista style declines, and standards of design are raised by the contemporary neo-Modernists, we'll notice the failings of such well-intentioned earlier precursors in the Distillery District.

However, to reiterate...

"So again, maybe it's not a matter of "an appropriate location for tall buildings", but whether the Gooderham site was an appropriate location for condos, at all? This is something which really ought to have been addressed 15 years ago, before the first condos stuck their feet into the door..."

If you notice, nobody's arguing against Pure/Clean Spirit on behalf of what came before it. (It's just that they're such entrenched faits accompli right now that scarcely anybody's raising the point of those earlier blocks, either.)