This property switched hands in the second half of last year. Lamb Development bought it.
 
Wellington House, the multiple buildings on Richmond, etc.

That said, something like has been done on Richmond probably wouldn't be all that bad here, maybe a couple floors shorter though.
 
ProjectEnd said:
Why is that a problem?
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Because it will probably overpower the surrounding buildings and not fit into the neighbourhood. The SAS building fits well, the G & M fits well, will a Brad Lamb building? I am prepared to be surprised, but I am not hopeful.
 
DSC said:
Because it will probably overpower the surrounding buildings and not fit into the neighbourhood. The SAS building fits well, the G & M fits well, will a Brad Lamb building? I am prepared to be surprised, but I am not hopeful.
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That's funny. I have never associated Brad Lamb with projects that overpower their surrounding context. I can think of a few worse.
 
DSC said:
Because it will probably overpower the surrounding buildings and not fit into the neighbourhood. The SAS building fits well, the G & M fits well, will a Brad Lamb building? I am prepared to be surprised, but I am not hopeful.
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'Overpower' is an interesting word to use. Are there examples of Lamb buildings doing this elsewhere? I can't think of any.

And you bring up the scale of the context - with G&M across the street and 25 Ontario just to the north, to me the 'context' is already denser and taller than you're giving credit for.
 
There's a Lamb building literally a stone's throw from the site - is that overpowering?
 
ProjectEnd said:
So the examples in your first paragraph are of things going wrong? I'm still a little lost as to why @DSC (and presumably yourself) seems to think that a higher FSI is an immediate disqualifier.
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Wellington House squeezes a tower onto a site that is essentially a single family home lot, especially in terms of width. It relies on adjacent sites to provide sufficient sunlight for side facing units.

The Richmond buildings have large amounts of density on small sites for sure, but they are more appropriate.

Lamb pushes high density for sure, luckily he hires a good architect who can usually make it work. It's always pushing the boundary really though.
 
When you say 'Richmond buildings' I assume you mean Harlowe and James? I think your last sentence is the most accurate since it acknowledges that while Brad's 'asks' are certainly aggressive, the resulting projects are always excellent architecturally and leave areas better than they were.

With regard to Wellington House, it is a different building than we normally see, but the slab form is generating some of the best, wide-shallow unit layouts we've seen in ages.
 
Regardless of the layout, if they look out at another building 3m away, it's still not that nice of a building. The shape of the building isn't the issue, it's setbacks.

And yes, I mean James and Harlowe. Usually, the buildings work, albeit barely. A lot of them end up with some pretty limited units in terms of sunlight - the north facing units in the Harlowe and James, the one at Adelaide and Brant will be the same looking directly into the new hotel building getting built to the north, etc.
 
Wellington House isn't approved yet, so we'll see if it ends up as large as proposed. No-one else has proposed something of that height on that street, so I don't think it's guaranteed. Here on King Street, @ProjectEnd is right: the new context is already fairly more substantial than the old one, and with the 17-storey Globe and Mail Centre right across the street, I would not be surprised to see something of a height proposed for this location.

42
 
interchange42 said:
Wellington House isn't approved yet, so we'll see if it ends up as large as proposed. No-one else has proposed something of that height on that street, so I don't think it's guaranteed. Here on King Street, @ProjectEnd is right: the new context is already fairly more substantial than the old one, and with the 17-storey Globe and Mail Centre right across the street, I would not be surprised to see something of a height proposed for this location.

42
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I may be unduly jaded but I think 17 storeys would be VERY much less than hoped for. Brad just got 25 floors approved at 53 Ontario thanks to the OMB - the City thought that was too tall. Height is certainly not everything but it cannot be ignored.
 
DSC said:
Because it will probably overpower the surrounding buildings and not fit into the neighbourhood. The SAS building fits well, the G & M fits well, will a Brad Lamb building? I am prepared to be surprised, but I am not hopeful.
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It would be tough to find another building as overpowering as the Globe and Mail building currently is on its surroundings. It's a small site. A skinny point tower of 25 storeys would be barely noticeable as it would also be lower than Globe and Mail building. IIRC, G+M is 85 metres. 25 storeys is less than 80.
 
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