Re: Distillery District-towers

I'm increasingly convinced that most secondary and precinct plans come with an unpublished appendix:

1 a) Plan details specifying requirements for height, density, built form, primary usage, street wall, materials and public space are to be interpreted as "when the time comes, build some shit."
 
Here's a small rendering scanned from the Condo Guide:

clearspiritez5.jpg
 
I like the look of the podium and how it will block the train tracks and the Gardiner. I'm undecided about the height of the towers.
 
Oh gawd, that looks horrible and overwhelming! It looks like someone moved the Convention Centre to the distillery district! Yeesh! And they even did the classic "impossible rendering", levitating staircases and all. I fear that surrounding the Distillery in modern towers really runs the possibility of changing it from a "district" to an open-air museum.
 
Any bigger and they should just glass in the whole District and call it a condo amenity.
 
i hated it... until i realized what that site looks like now. the district needs to be boxed in with SOMETHING because the gardiner takes away tremendously from the site... i just hope it wont look like the back of a kmart with glass, as this one seems to.
 
That looks disgusting. I assume that's Balzac's? If so, then you'll have one giant tower to the north-west (Pure Spirit) then this one...and wasn't there another? To top it all off you have a giant glass wall for a big condo lobby.

This will really damage the look and feel of the district. What's the city thinking?!!
 
I don't see how we can come to any conclusion from that rendering. It's from a terrible angle with very little detail. I think a building there will work fine, simplistic and modern will make a nice companion to the old Victorian Industrial Architecture. If the site is to be developed (which it is) I'd much rather take this over some poor attempted to match what's already there. This is a very European idea mixing the old with the new, and I'm confident that Cityscape Holdings who's master plan it is to keep this a pedestrian only village will do a good job. If it was TEDCO I might be a bit more concerned.

Currently this is the view we have, a parking lot , the railway, power lines, and the Gardiner. Nothing worth protecting.

Taken by:http://flickr.com/photos/clgray/
150473618_8447019a12_o.jpg
 
I'm not fond of how close this is to the historic buildings. While I'm all for blocking out the gardner, I think even a brick wall would be better than this glass curtain.
 
My fear is that this will overwhelm and dominate the area. While modern up against the old is fine as a concept, the massing of this project and the lack of context in form, as well as material, does not appear to be well executed.
 
I think that rendering above looks really good. Much better than the ones they built on the north side of Mill Street. Those ones are trying to replicate the old look and fail IMHO. Bring it on.
 
I agree with Andrew. As with the Centre Pompideau in Paris, the juxtoposition of the old with the new can be very striking. Also, the Distillary District has been conceived as a vibrant and dynamic cultural and commercial area, which to me is somewhat in contradiction to the view that some here are advocating of it being preserved as an open air museum.
 
I also have the feeling that rendering was done a long time ago, I doubt that the finished product will look like that.
 
Tewder said:
I agree with Andrew. As with the Centre Pompideau in Paris, the juxtoposition of the old with the new can be very striking. Also, the Distillary District has been conceived as a vibrant and dynamic cultural and commercial area, which to me is somewhat in contradiction to the view that some here are advocating of it being preserved as an open air museum.
Click to expand...

Paris has a lot of areas of relatively untouched areas. Areas of continuous historical structures aren't common in Toronto...why build massive towers in one of the only ones we have?
 
Andrew3D said:
I don't see how we can come to any conclusion from that rendering. It's from a terrible angle with very little detail. I think a building there will work fine, simplistic and modern will make a nice companion to the old Victorian Industrial Architecture. If the site is to be developed (which it is) I'd much rather take this over some poor attempted to match what's already there. This is a very European idea mixing the old with the new, and I'm confident that Cityscape Holdings who's master plan it is to keep this a pedestrian only village will do a good job. If it was TEDCO I might be a bit more concerned.

Currently this is the view we have, a parking lot , the railway, power lines, and the Gardiner. Nothing worth protecting.

Taken by:http://flickr.com/photos/clgray/
150473618_8447019a12_o.jpg
Click to expand...


For me it's not so much the glass wall, but the massive tower in the background.

I would also question why it's either a tall glass point tower or a poor attempt to match what's there. How about a good attempt at something modern and well scaled that fits in?
 
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