[whatever]

Sounds like a temporary structure that will occupy the site for time being, until UHN comes up with the need/money to develop the site more intensively. Kind of like the LCBO at King/Spadina (which is already being considered for redevelopment)

 

[anonymous0024]

All the windows have now been removed, from today:

 

[adma]

Anyone for grated cheese?

 

[Automation Gallery]

Im surprised no one is bitching about this monstrosity coming down

 

[adma]

You mean, as in bemoaning another lost Brutalist masterwork?

Well, it *is* an intriguing bit of circa-1970 Brutalist pyrotechnics. But it's almost like its era's version of a circa-1870 outlandishly-over-the-top Victorian eclectic bauble falling to the wreckers ball just before World War I...

 

[khris]

It's not a great example of brutalist. Not my favourite in the city for sure. However it does suck to lose it I think.

 

[Red October]

The more I look at it in those pictures the more I actually like it. It's amazing how good Brutalist architecture can look when the building is clean.

That being said it's certainly not one of the best Brutalist buildings in the city. That honour goes to Fort Book and 222 Jarvis.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

I don't know if calling this a Brutalist building is accurate...but in any case, I thought this building is quite interesting and hardly an eyesore (other than the fact that the ground level has deteriorated).

AoD

 

[BobBob]

That's a cool building, reminds me of Tokyo.

Really too bad, seems robust enough to be repurposed, but maybe there are other issues here.

 

[SP!RE]

So what's going in its place again? It seems like a large building to demolish without a pretty damn good rationale.

 

[planning2plan]

Good from far, but far from good?... The more I look at it with no windows in it, it actually looks cool. Sadly, in order for it to function, it needs windows and they REALLY take away from the design. I am sure this was a building that looked great on paper and then fell seriously short when it was finally finished.

 

[LowPolygon]

i wish they would tear down that hideous pomo-clunker across the road instead. it's easily one of the ugliest buildings in the downtown core.

 

[adma]

That being said it's certainly not one of the best Brutalist buildings in the city. That honour goes to Fort Book and 222 Jarvis.

Though those two are more like obvious potboiler examples. And actually, going back 40 years I can definitely see this building in its nurses' residence days as a dead-cert for a contemporary-architecture-in-Toronto guide--I mean, it's definitely designed to look terrific in an issue of Architectural Review or whatever.

The problem is, for all its architectural histrionics, the building's a classic case of a Brutalist building that was perversely hair-shirted on a human level--it seemed like everything about it that was meant to actually serve humans felt mean and tightly compressed. Even typical anti-Brutalist kicking-posts like Boston City Hall feel generous next to this. And typically enough, such a building has lately worn its months-long asbestos-abatement signage with a certain anti-pride. And subsequent reuse for functions that *could have* made good use of it (it was Toronto's Int'l Youth Hostel for a spell in the 90s, no?) didn't work out, either. Maybe it was all too early for a Brutalist Appreciation Society mood to spread wide; but, still.

That's why I frame it as the modern version of some Ulysses Grant-era super-mansarded outlandishness that was so perversely over-the-top, it couldn't last half a century...

 

[plyta]

Today:

The Eastern side is almost fully stripped

 

[interchange42]

We'll have to rename this forum 'Projects and Deconstruction'.