- Thread starter Bayer
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UtakataNoAnnex
Senior Member
I wouldn't be too upset if this one gets rejected here. It seems uninspiring, clunky, subpar and problematic...and thus fits in the tall-doesn't-mean-it's-good category for me.
Northern Light
Superstar
Jack over at BlogTO has put up his piece on this tower now. To my amusement, both the headline and the text of the article say something that just isn't true.
He calls the tower 'pencil thin'; in point of fact, as I noted earlier, this tower has an above-average sized floor plate.
The size of the site is small, the girth of this building is not.
www.blogto.com
* note to Jack, when reading my posts, don't skip any important bits. LOL
He calls the tower 'pencil thin'; in point of fact, as I noted earlier, this tower has an above-average sized floor plate.
The size of the site is small, the girth of this building is not.
Pencil-thin 94-storey tower proposed to loom high over busy Toronto street
Toronto's years-long development boom is shifting the height balance away from the Financial District with new skyscraper peaks around the downtown c…
www.blogto.com
* note to Jack, when reading my posts, don't skip any important bits. LOL
Northern Light
Superstar
@ProjectEnd is out with some thoughts on this proposal. As usual, he's completely on-the-fence in his opinions, and your just not clear on what his take is........LOL
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Seriously, PE is raising great points; I'd go a bit further........
Lets talk about potentially serious problems.
1) Evacuation in the event of a fire. 94 floors is along way down even for someone able-bodied, never mind the problem of someone in a wheelchair or the like. There's also a time elapsed question. If smoke is filling a building, how many minutes of breathing that in can one sustain? PS, the time model for an older adult using stairs is typically 1.3 seconds per step. Assuming 22 (or more) steps between floors, depending on ceiling height, that's 32 seconds per floor. At 94 floors, that's over 45 minutes to exit the building.
2) Evacuation/need to exit can be an issue for just routine life in the event of an elevator failure or power failure. Are we considering exactly what back-up power needs to be able to support?
3) We've seen examples of people who literally couldn't access their units by elevator for weeks. Sufficient redudency to each floor is crucial.
4) A few buildings have now made clear the problems of water supply to upper floors, both in the mainline risers and in fire suppression systems. Pumps are required, and pumps can and do fail. Not only do we need to reduce the risk of failure and ensure backup power for these; we also need to talk redundancy.
5) Even with firefighter operation of an elevator, we need to talk response time impacts over such long distances (same with EMS and Police).
That's without getting into myriad other details; and the complexity of future maintenance for condo boards as well. Many have performed poorly on much smaller buildings and simpler buildings, this becomes an even greater concern with a building such as this.
***
Seriously, PE is raising great points; I'd go a bit further........
Lets talk about potentially serious problems.
1) Evacuation in the event of a fire. 94 floors is along way down even for someone able-bodied, never mind the problem of someone in a wheelchair or the like. There's also a time elapsed question. If smoke is filling a building, how many minutes of breathing that in can one sustain? PS, the time model for an older adult using stairs is typically 1.3 seconds per step. Assuming 22 (or more) steps between floors, depending on ceiling height, that's 32 seconds per floor. At 94 floors, that's over 45 minutes to exit the building.
2) Evacuation/need to exit can be an issue for just routine life in the event of an elevator failure or power failure. Are we considering exactly what back-up power needs to be able to support?
3) We've seen examples of people who literally couldn't access their units by elevator for weeks. Sufficient redudency to each floor is crucial.
4) A few buildings have now made clear the problems of water supply to upper floors, both in the mainline risers and in fire suppression systems. Pumps are required, and pumps can and do fail. Not only do we need to reduce the risk of failure and ensure backup power for these; we also need to talk redundancy.
5) Even with firefighter operation of an elevator, we need to talk response time impacts over such long distances (same with EMS and Police).
That's without getting into myriad other details; and the complexity of future maintenance for condo boards as well. Many have performed poorly on much smaller buildings and simpler buildings, this becomes an even greater concern with a building such as this.
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3Dementia
Senior Member
Jack over at BlogTO has put up his piece on this tower now. To my amusement, both the headline and the text of the article say something that just isn't true.
He calls the tower 'pencil thin'; in point of fact, as I noted earlier, this tower has an above-average sized floor plate.
The size of the site is small, the girth of this building is not.
Pencil-thin 94-storey tower proposed to loom high over busy Toronto street
Toronto's years-long development boom is shifting the height balance away from the Financial District with new skyscraper peaks around the downtown c…
* note to Jack, when reading my posts, don't skip any important bits. LOL
I too laughed at yet another BlogTO gaff given the large floor-plates on this one. Closer to a Magnum "Sharpie" than a pencil.
As I've noted before, in their rush to post (usually Urban Toronto) news... Blog really needs to hire a proof reader:
From the article: “At that height, it would be among the first Canadian buildings to surpass the elusive 300-metre/100-foot mark, where a skyscraper takes on the even more impressive (but completely arbitrary) title of "supertall" according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.”
I'm sure he meant '1000 feet' but that math has always been incorrect. American ‘scraper geeks have always obsessed about ‘1000 - footers’ but the 300 metre ‘super-tall’ metric = 984.252 feet.
Lenser
Senior Member
Hmmmmm. So-called luxury towers where EMS has to wait 30 minutes for an elevator.... no way that's dystopian at all. And a pencil tower - really, BlogTO?
Okay, higher-res images for everyone, pixel-for-pixel from the architectural docs:
My take on these being the only renderings is that this is an early salvo, that they know the City will not accept this as submitted, and therefore they don't want to spend more than they have to on renderings until they have a massing agreed to sometime later.
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My take on these being the only renderings is that this is an early salvo, that they know the City will not accept this as submitted, and therefore they don't want to spend more than they have to on renderings until they have a massing agreed to sometime later.
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Lenser
Senior Member
You know, it ain't bad at all. The elevator issue is problematic, to say the least. I like the slanted top and though the window treatment looks a little busy, it's not terrible. I wish the predominant colour was black; that would lend it more gravitas.
christiesplits
Senior Member
In addition to these concerns, would this project be AODA-compliant?
I've never been on the elevator of a 70+ floor condo like Aura or One Bloor. How long is a typical wait for the elevator, say at 8:30 am or 5:30 pm?
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cd concept
Senior Member
Love to see someone photo shop this building by cutting this building's width in half. But keeping the height and remaining part of the tower to the west portion of this parcel of land. To be further away from The One tower in the photo up above might just look better lol!
3Dementia
Senior Member
ADRM
Senior Member
I know people at Aura can wait up to 15 minutes for an elevator, depending on how many are out of service on any given day, which is obviously insane.
And, yeah, to pile on: this is a trash proposal.
UrbanAffair
Senior Member
Aesthetically, this looks....fine. Would be nice to get some architecture of interest though, instead of "fine".
We've put a front page story up now too, looking at the various numbers here, including things we've been taking more notice of lately like the number of units per elevator, the tight separation distances, and this time we've also noting the FSI, which is the highest we've ever seen in this city.
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Bayer
Senior Member
You don't even need to be up that far. I lived on the 50th floor of Residences of College Park I for 10 years, as I mentioned several times before. There are 6 elevators for 658 apartments, which would be considered borderline acceptable - but in reality, it absolutely wasn't. Breakdowns were frequent and prolonged, and the inconvenience and, in fact, danger of actually being a prisoner of your apartment or not being able to reach it made me swear to never live on a very high floor ever again.
And as Northern Light mentioned before, water is an issue. My cold water supply in the shower was fluctuating continuously - I learned to get out of the way of scalding hot water at the first sign of pressure change.