Wellington Square is much better utilized now since the landscaping spruce-up. (I wish we'd seen better looking fences though. What we got look very off-the-chelf cheap.)

42
 
The lobby looks very nice (designed by Munge Leung), it should make up for the very banal exterior:

fly.jpg

photo courtesy of Eventscape. Eventscape fabricated the handcut emerald green mirrored columns.
more on it here:
http://eventscape.net/index.php/news_/taking_flight
 

Attachments

  • fly.jpg
    fly.jpg
    50.1 KB · Views: 1,316
Wellington Square is much better utilized now since the landscaping spruce-up. (I wish we'd seen better looking fences though. What we got look very off-the-chelf cheap.)

42

I hate those cheap aluminum fences that seem to be going up in all new parks. They are putting that same crap up in the new Regent Park Central Park. For some reason, the city of Toronto never does nice fencing. I drool when I see beautiful, black, wrought iron fences in London and Paris. I wish we did those here aw well.
 
^ But market...and profit...and development!

Totally agreed, it's painful how almost everything in this city ends up being the cheapest possible option. And if a development doesn't use the cheapest option, it becomes prohibitively expensive for all but the richest. There are so few options between luxury and semi-luxury developments and neo-slum buildings.
 
Remember that this building was originally proposed with a lot more going on architecturally, and then it was released just as things were falling apart in 2008. It was redesigned more cheaply on purpose so that they could bring the prices in lower, and it managed to sell through the downturn. Think of Fly in its historical context, as a monument to Lehman Brothers!

42

This post is well worth repeating.
 
I hate those cheap aluminum fences that seem to be going up in all new parks. They are putting that same crap up in the new Regent Park Central Park. For some reason, the city of Toronto never does nice fencing. I drool when I see beautiful, black, wrought iron fences in London and Paris. I wish we did those here aw well.

welcome to a city where if it isn't the absolute cheapest option available it is a waste of money.

Gravy Train Elitists!
 
Remember that this building was originally proposed with a lot more going on architecturally, and then it was released just as things were falling apart in 2008. It was redesigned more cheaply on purpose so that they could bring the prices in lower, and it managed to sell through the downturn. Think of Fly in its historical context, as a monument to Lehman Brothers!

42

You've neglected to mention the fact that most of the Fly condo pre-sales occurred prior to the '08 blip, essentially rendering the blip irrelevant to their build-out plans. In fact it might have even saved them on construction costs. The crash in the US amounted to little more that a 3 or 4 month anomaly, prices having fully recovered within that time. By Feb '09 pre-construction sales were gaining strength again too.

In my books Fly condos along with West Side lofts and a few others are good examples of bait and switch marketing. If anything they used the 'crash' as an excuse to shave costs.
 
Last edited:
It's not the transparency of the glass that's the problem: I like the clear glazing of mechanical penthouses, like at most CityPlace buildings.

It's all about the lighting. At CityPlace they had artist Adrian Gollner design the nighttime effect with different colours for each project, and the lights and their positions are chosen carefully.

It seems that none of that has been though of here.42

Dropped by the Empire Communities open house this afternoon - hoping to find someone from Empire who could speak to the mechanical penthouse lighting. One Empire representative was doing tours of the building builder's inventory suites and amenities. He was not aware of any issues with the rooftop lighting, any plans to have it addressed, or who in the Empire organization would be the appropriate contact to find out. This is six months after an Empire site coordinator / construction project manager had confirmed the problem and said that Empire was aware of it. (See post 704 in this thread).

Evenings and overnight, after the daylight starts to fade, this has to be the ugliest building in the downtown Toronto skyline. The effect of the mechanical penthouse lighting has not gotten any better with time - it is truly godawful.
 
You've neglected to mention the fact that most of the Fly condo pre-sales occurred prior to the '08 blip, essentially rendering the blip irrelevant to their build-out plans. In fact it might have even saved them on construction costs. The crash in the US amounted to little more that a 3 or 4 month anomaly, prices having fully recovered within that time. By Feb '09 pre-construction sales were gaining strength again too.

I neglected to mention it because it's not true.

Lehman Brothers failed on Sept 15, 2008. As of October 2008 there had only been a few friends and family sales, no VIP nor Broker event yet. Fly was substantially sold after the '08 blip, not prior to it. If you go through the early pages of this thread it is all documented.

42
 

Back
Top