70Challenger
Active Member
It’s so clean now, from one of the worst proposals to one of the best.
Someone at WZMH had a dig through the archive:
Someone at WZMH had a dig through the archive:
![TowerHillEast1.jpg](https://www.acotoronto.ca/images/buildings/Large/TowerHillEast1.jpg)
Last edited:
I'm slow to want to complain about the gutting of the United Building; they are spending more on retaining the heritage walls there than any other private project this city has seen. This is a newer building than United was, and maybe just that much easier to retrofit than it was that they can make the numbers work. To me, where this easily surpasses United is in the strong likeness of the original building in its residential offspring above.Now this is much more like it! Kudos to all involved! Rather than saving 60% of the original building, they could easily have gone the standard route of facadism(similar to the United Building). At any rate, it's certainly a terrific example of how the DRP process need not be adversarial. Here's hoping that the 'c' word, ahem, 'collaboration', becomes the rule rather than the exception in cases like this!
I'm pretty certain that what United's developers are spending today will be fairly well reimbursed when their units are all sold. Regardless of how much money a developer might spend, when we designate a building and then allow only a few external walls to be preserved, we lose any historical or architectural context that the building might have had. At the end of the day, a building, heritage or otherwise, is always more than its four external walls. When we gut a building, particularly one that has retained a great deal of its original interior, not only are we deceiving ourselves by calling it preservation, but we're shortchanging our future. European cities like Paris, Brussels, Berlin et al., with far greater stock of heritage structures than us, have understood this for years, and it is well reflected in their city centres.I'm slow to want to complain about the gutting of the United Building; they are spending more on retaining the heritage walls there than any other private project this city has seen. This is a newer building than United was, and maybe just that much easier to retrofit than it was that they can make the numbers work. To me, where this easily surpasses United is in the strong likeness of the original building in its residential offspring above.
42
This is the wrong thread to get too deep into the United Building... but while I believe that we have to do much more in regards to preserving embodied carbon for environmental reasons, and we should preserve interiors that are notable… without knowing its particulars, I have to satisfy myself that Toronto Preservation Services did not find attributes of the United Building's interiors there that they insisted on retaining. I certainly don't remember any outcry from the city's architectural community at the time that it was going to come down that we were losing anything out-of-the-ordinary. Maybe there were some attributes of its interiors that raised it above the nondescript, but they failed to tip the scales for the group making the decisions then. Failing heritage designation, building owners have to weigh the costs of preserving a building solely for its age, if they can no longer afford to maintain it.I'm pretty certain that what United's developers are spending today will be fairly well reimbursed when their units are all sold. Regardless of how much money a developer might spend, when we designate a building and then allow only a few external walls to be preserved, we lose any historical or architectural context that the building might have had. At the end of the day, a building, heritage or otherwise, is always more than its four external walls. When we gut a building, particularly one that has retained a great deal of its original interior, not only are we deceiving ourselves by calling it preservation, but we're shortchanging our future. European cities like Paris, Brussels, Berlin et al., with far greater stock of heritage structures than us, have understood this for years, and it is well reflected in their city centres.
I'm in complete agreement with your assessment of 522 University Ave. As for facadism in general, though it occurs just about everywhere in North America, Toronto seems to excel at the practice of saving one or two walls of a heritage structure and brazenly passing it off as preservation. Though I don't have any statistics at hand, going by what I've seen over the past several decades, I also have to wonder whether Toronto Preservation Services has ever found an interior they consider worthy of retaining.This is the wrong thread to get too deep into the United Building... but while I believe that we have to do much more in regards to preserving embodied carbon for environmental reasons, and we should preserve interiors that are notable… without knowing its particulars, I have to satisfy myself that Toronto Preservation Services did not find attributes of the United Building's interiors there that they insisted on retaining. I certainly don't remember any outcry from the city's architectural community at the time that it was going to come down that we were losing anything out-of-the-ordinary. Maybe there were some attributes of its interiors that raised it above the nondescript, but they failed to tip the scales for the group making the decisions then. Failing heritage designation, building owners have to weigh the costs of preserving a building solely for its age, if they can no longer afford to maintain it.
In the 522 University case, the ownership have come 'round to believing that saving what they propose to of it will make business sense for them, and thank goodness, as they've got a plan that preserves most of the embodied carbon, preserves the architectural expression, and celebrates it will a sensitive addition to the top.
42
^In what way is the Star Building interesting?
I don't think a building has to be interesting to be preserved, it's about keeping the city's architectural timeline intact so people will understand how we got from point A (log huts) to point B (King Toronto).Colour, texture, proportions, solidity, recessed windows. It utterly fails in its interaction with the pedestrian realm but as 522 University Avenue shows, these issues can be addressed and turned into something beautiful. People are far too ready to destroy rather than recognizing existing attractive qualities and capitalizing on them. Do people just not see what's possible or is it laziness? I'm not quite sure.