oh geez! that crane must be over 300m off the ground!

Here are 3 more pics from 2 days ago. Close ups of the steel:

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Despite their unfortunate design flaws, I actually prefer ROCP 1 & 2 (as shown above) to Aura.
 
Breathing life back into Yonge St.

Haha. Ya, by putting 2 banks facing the street at the base of your building. Life!

Wow, this article is truly ridiculous. Talk about rewritting history. Except for a year I've been living in this area since 1988, and the street was doing fine before the appearance of this misshapen mess, with its chain restaurants, laughable underground "mall", forgettable American big box stores and really hopping banking scene.
 
That's quite generous of you, junctionist. I do appreciate the well-articulated alternative viewpoint though. If we're gonna live with this beast forever, we have to make peace with it somehow.

CN did make a posting about the 5 stages of architectural mania:

As I posted once before, the Five Stages Of Architectural Mania:

1) OMG - that rendering looks fantastic. I can't wait to see this built. This will really help that area. Can they make it taller?
2) This one has been taking way too long. Wait - is that activity on site? No? Damn. This one is really taking too long. Why is it taking so long?
3) Hey! - the concrete is above ground level now it's looking good. It should really take off now. Can't wait to see this one finished.
4) Oh f*&ck - Is that the cladding? It doesn't look anything like the rendering. This is horrible! I can't believe this. F*&king Toronto. What the f*&k are they thinking? I never want to see this building again. (furious ultimatums about proper taste in cladding fly thick and fast, darkening the site).
5) (sigh) Well, altogether, I guess it looks alright. Could have been a lot better, though.
Hey, have you seen this new proposal?

I think with Aura we're currently on stage four.

http://urbantoronto.ca/forum/showth...f-College-Park-III-(Canderel-78s-G-C)/page324

I think with that, we moved from Stage 4 to 5.

AoD
 
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^^ Exactly! Notice they didn't mention anything about the disastrous basement mall? lol

Yep.

Wow, this article is truly ridiculous. Talk about rewritting history. Except for a year I've been living in this area since 1988, and the street was doing fine before the appearance of this misshapen mess, with its chain restaurants, laughable underground "mall", forgettable American big box stores and really hopping banking scene.

Exactly what I was thinking.
 
Yup. The corner of Gerrard & Yonge were just fine. A parking lot and 3 hot dog stands. :)
 
Yup. The corner of Gerrard & Yonge were just fine. A parking lot and 3 hot dog stands. :)

Yeah, no, that corner was bad, that's for certain. But the article makes it sound like all of Yonge street was deserted. And that's just not the case--for a long time it's been a pedestrian thoroughfare. And the article overlooks how bad the retail/commercial really is at Aura. Fine, the restaurants--whatever. But the bank? The underground mall?
 
Despite their unfortunate design flaws, I actually prefer ROCP 1 & 2 (as shown above) to Aura.

I wouldn't go that far, especially at streetlevel.

the retail units on Yonge are generally very good at AURA, just not the tenants. the banks are lamentable, but even then significant life is brought just from the people entering and exiting the escalator bank to reach the 3 levels of retail above the first floor. The restaurants along Gerrard are nice as well. The only truly negative thing about the retail at AURA is the underground mall, and even then I think that will sort of transition into a pretty neat space in the coming decade as it matures and the owners figure out what the hell to do with it.
 
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Actually the NW corner of Yonge and Gerrard was much better when it was empty, for the simple reason that we used to have hope that something good was going to be built there.

Now all we have left is the grim reality of having to live with this mountain of hamfisted mediocrity until the end of time.
 

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