LowPolygon
Senior Member
To me the "step pyramid" or ziggurat, as you have called it, is very symbolic of New York city skyscrapers (due to the light and shadow ordinance of 1906) and, maybe for that reason, I associate positively with it. I feel it's natural for a skyscraper to have a stepped back design the same way that I think it's natural for a rock band to have a drummer, a bass guitarist and a lead singer - there's nothing that says it has to be that way, it's just the classic way tha skyscrapers were designed in the city that defined the skyscraper.
I don't think it's a "tired" design at all. Some of my favourite skyscrapers in the world, whether they were built in NY or not, have something resembling a step pyramid shape: the Messeturm, Chrysler Tower, International Finance Centre in HK, Jin Mao, etc. It was also natural for almost every pre-WW2 skyscraper to have in every city unless it was one of those Beaux Arts piles that was one solid mass twenty stories up (think Commerce Court North).
It's true that Toronto's best highrises didn't utilize this design, although the Canada Trust tower at Brookfield place (or whatever it's called now) makes a good effort.
I agree with you. It’s a natural shape for a tower for the reasons you’ve cited, and, well handled, it can be extraordinarily beautiful. I wish Toronto had a lot more good examples of buildings in the historicist style. 1 St Thomas, though too small, is excellent, and Canada Trust Tower is a solid B in my view, although even there I wish it was 10 or 20 stories higher. Even The Esplanade in its way has some redeeming features. Of course both Canada Trust and Esplanade were built in the latter years of postmodernism so they are actually very current designs for the time. 1 St. Thomas is the sole historicist-styled project built in the last 20 years that has any genuine merit. Why is that?:
1. very talented architect
2. very high grade materials
3. extraordinary attention to detail
The problem for me lies in the fact that in every other case, be it Uptown, Trump, ROCP, 1 King West, or any number of smaller less visible projects, the historicist style is so poorly handled that they end up just being giant, cheap eyesores. I hate Trump, ROCP etc, for the same reason I loathe McMansions—they are pastiches of earlier architectural styles, ersatz architecture, mimicking the past without any of the visual integrity and design intelligence that motivated those buildings. There is virtually no possibility that memorable historicist buildings of lasting value can be accomplished with precast concrete, window wall and spandrel.
In Toronto, in 2012, the combination of mediocre to bad architects, the inevitable corner-cutting that eliminates most of the visually interesting details, and the relentlessly cheap and downmarket materials, turns these buildings into dead-on-arrival white elephants every time.
The only way to pull it off is to spend a lot more money on architects and materials than Toronto developers are willing to spend. So they just end up being monuments to kitsch--every time*.
So the question is, why bother?
*According to the Wiki, “an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons, while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal".