Why couldn't they keep the wrap on the Wellesley side to create a more urban street frontage and retain the landscape area on the residential street, especially given the adjacency to Barbara Hall Park? Seems funny this way.
 
I guess that rebuilding the Immanuel Baptist Church is now officially off the table...
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It complements the original tower, although whether that's a good thing is debatable. What's with the long balconies on the top 2 floors of the north facade? So unnecessary and unsightly! And the tower seems to have a clone a few blocks down the street :)
 
I had the same feeling. IMO, the new addition on it's own isn't too bad, and has some retro apartment influences. But the current direction taken seems to blend in with the original tower a tad much.
 
Yeah, I'm in agreement that this is an excellent design, quite sensitive to the original architecture, while being a more modern variation of it. There is still only 15 metres between suites in the existing building looking north and in the new arm looking south… but this settlement design is a huge step forward. There's still a Site Plan Approval application to be presented to the City for review, so it will still be a while before anything happens here.

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Very happy with the look of this - especially the retail element. Could be a game-changer in so many parts of the city.
 
"...quite sensitive to the original architecture," Come on, let's call a spade a space. The grounds are integral to the architecture in the same way that Nathan Phillips Square is integral to City Hall. . This is about rejecting those ideas about architecture and wanting to hide the building from view. This has everything to do with placing little to no value on 70s architecture.

Would people be giving this their rubber stamp if that were was Victorian era architecture on that block instead? Of course not. They'd be up in arms. I understand the issues with tower in the park developments but sometime people need to leave things alone. It won't be a popular view on here, but we need to preserve a few examples of this kind of architecture .........and this is one of the better examples of it.

Toronto won't, of course. Every era of architecture eventually falls out of favour and gets stripped away. I guarantee that 99% of what we're building today will one day be deemed ugly. We'll demolished it with zeal.
 
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isaidso said:
"...quite sensitive to the original architecture," Come on, let's call a spade a space. The grounds are integral to the architecture in the same way that Nathan Phillips Square is integral to City Hall. . This is about rejecting those ideas about architecture and wanting to hide the building from view. This has everything to do with placing little to no value on 70s architecture.

Would people be giving this their rubber stamp if that were was Victorian era architecture on that block instead? Of course not. They'd be up in arms. I understand the issues with tower in the park developments but sometime people need to leave things alone. It won't be a popular view on here, but we need to preserve a few examples of this kind of architecture .........and this is one of the better examples of it.

Toronto won't, of course. Every era of architecture eventually falls out of favour and gets stripped away. I guarantee that 99% of what we're building today will one day fall out of favour. It will be deemed ugly and demolished with zeal.
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I agree with you that 99% of what iis being built will fall out of favour - mostly because it's not even "in favour" right now. I also agree that we ought to preserve older buildings, including some modern and postmodern era buildings.

However, I see this particular move as a rightful rejection of 20th-century, tower-in-the-park urban planning schemes, rather than a rejection of the architecture itself. The people who gave us this building-as-tombstone, city-as-graveyard architecture thought they could impose a permanent order on the city and on society that would last for all time. In practise they inflicted major damage to the morphology of existing cities which are by nature, organic, shape-shifting, and ever changing.

This is also about the value of land and the demand for housing in the central city . When 100 Wellesley was built, a large swath of unused, permanently-in-shadow green space (on a major arterial road in the centre of downtown Toronto) was economically feasible because the population was a fraction of what it is now, the city was sprawling outward and very few people were interested in living downtown. Now, it's an extremely expensive lavatory for a few dogs.
 
The render-people have lightened up the brown brick of the exisiting tower considerbly, making it look more like a harmonous add-on, which it's not. There is no twin building down the street, someone in render-land took a photo looking north on Jarvis, reversed it and then pasted it so that it appeasr south on Jarvis. I'd have no clue as to why they'd do that.
 
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