ushahid said:
http://urbantoronto.ca/news/2014/05/smaller-taller-mirvishgehry-20-reboots-landmark-proposal

I am so pissed off right now. the city council f@%^$~ up the whole project. they can't manage the infrastructure of a city and they just ruined a proposal. the skyline looks dull because of these guys. there is nothing interesting in Toronto's skyline. so many ugly looking buildings and two more are being added to the skyline. i wasn't expecting this from Gehry he really disapointed me. the only good thing in these two towers is the height, which i am damn sure will be reduced by the city council because they cant see us happy. i am not interested in these towers anymore.After so much wait and patience thats what we got-crap. :mad:
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Hahaha:D, Come-on Ushy... sit back and wait for the final design, im sure you'll change your mind
 
Automation Gallery said:
Hahaha:D, Come-on Ushy... sit back and wait for the final design, im sure you'll change your mind
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Im happy we get to keep another theatre. With a growing city we need more entertainment options and Im sure Mirvish can donate his art to the AGO if he really wants to. Either way Ill take a theatre I know over a Art gallery I have no idea how many pieces would be in it, any day of the week.
 
Yes, indeed - only would a 300m tower by Gehry elicit such a negative response (oh the ruin of the city!) while said individuals sung praises of that exemplar by College Park.

AoD
 
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From the people who complained about whining and bitching about density et al. at the Planning Department so vociferously a couple months ago, there's a lot of whining and bitching coming from those same people. Come on, this is just as incredible Gehry design with heritage saved, a new supertall that won't affect the local planning regime like Festival tower did so annoyingly and broad support from the community, Council and the planning department. Were those first towers really so shiny and cool that you can't accept these which honestly aren't a huge difference?

Seems childish to whine like some people are about this horrible, horrible compromise.
 
I'll echo Mike in TO's earlier point to all the tough-guy, I-know-better, keyboard commandos out there: where were you last night? Where were you throughout this process? Posting on UT is a nice way to vent frustration but why go to all the trouble of getting your blood pressure up when you're not going to do anything to insert yourself into a process which many of you claim to know everything about?

Had you been there, you would have seen the evolution of the proposal and been able to get answers to your questions from both Gehry's design team and any number of senior city staff. Since you weren't you're left spluttering empty hyperbole about how 'everything is ruined' and how 'you'll never forgive 'them.'''

Utter windbags.
 
PinkLucy said:
One long-term power outage or elevator breakdown, and the thrill of living on a high floor gets a little tarnished :) Especially if you have a dog that needs to go out. Even when the elevators work, there is of course the issue of waiting for them. First world problems :) (but it's something to consider when deciding whether or not to live on a high floor)
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One big flood and the appeal of Etobicoke living gets mouldy...
 
Ramako said:
the city had nothing to do with the re-design, but my all means, continue pushing this ridiculous and uninformed narrative.
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Since the city rejected the initial proposal and demanded existing POS buildings be incorporated into the plan, wouldn't that make it absurd to claim they aren't responsible for the redesign?

At least the towers will probably look pretty slick. I'm gonna try and stay positive about it.
 
I love the design. Sure its different than before, but not inferior IMO. The loss of one tower is a non-factor. The only material difference is retaining the designated street front and losing the podium. However the podium was the hardest to assess - exciting, challenging, yet risky.

Stil the best project in the city - by far.
 
Ramako said:
That's a silly thing to say considering that the city had nothing to do with the re-design, but my all means, continue pushing this ridiculous and uninformed narrative.
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I agree. Many here are acting like the city simply stopped Gehry from being his usual artsy self. He could have easily put all those nice white clouds and made it curve as much as possible or whatever. He ended up not doing that, and that can be due to multiple reasons such as economics, engineering problems, etc. People here seem to have this knee-jerk reaction of simply blaming the city staff for every situation where some architect proposed a more realistic design. The initial rendering with the nice white clouds was literally a sketch on a napkin. For all we know they could come back as this proposal evolves. Gehry and Mirvish both want to make their mark with this tower. I'm 100% sure they knew their initial proposal was super unrealistic with the demolition of heritage structures and too much density. It would have easily been rejected in any "world-class" city like NYC or London, and they know that. Also, keep in mind the city planners, including Keesmat, want this proposal to go through as much as Mirvish and Gehry do. They are not simply out to get developers and they are not evil people that are in love with glass boxes.

Instead why can't we focus on the fact that we got a wonderful supertall structure (Toronto's first) that is architecturally significant (i.e not simply a box) that will preserve Toronto's heritage, and be a landmark once it's finished with a public plaza? Hm? It seems this building so far goes against everything that people here claim to define Toronto.
 
freshcutgrass said:
Since the city rejected the initial proposal and demanded existing POS buildings be incorporated into the plan, wouldn't that make it absurd to claim they aren't responsible for the redesign?

At least the towers will probably look pretty slick. I'm gonna try and stay positive about it.
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I think it's absurd to think that the initial designs of the projects were ever going to get built as-is, even with the city's approval. If someone wants to blame the city for axing the west tower, that's fine, but there was no mandate to re-design it architecturally. That's a choice that Mirvish and Gehry made - and a completely unsurprising choice given that the economics are simply not there to build the original proposals and never were.

Anyone who didn't expect the architectural features of the proposal to get significantly watered down or revised, irrespective of the city's stance on the matter, was living in a dream world and ignoring what was coming out of Gehry's mouth. Even 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan (which unlike Toronto's Gehry towers, was sold at high-end luxury prices) didn't come close to the kinds of architectural flourishes that the original Mirvish+Gehry concept proposed, yet somehow people were expecting that this mid-market project was going to make that very bold project (in its own right) look like a conservative box. Could anyone honestly look at those original models and think they had any chance of being built as-is? What we're seeing proposed by Mirvish & Gehry now is much more in line with what could realistically be expected given the price point at which it would be selling - i.e. something more or less similar to 8 Spruce Street.
 
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scamander24 said:
Instead why can't we focus on the fact that we got a wonderful supertall structure (Toronto's first) that is architecturally significant (i.e not simply a box) that will preserve Toronto's heritage, and be a landmark once it's finished with a public plaza? Hm? It seems this building so far goes against everything that people here claim to define Toronto.
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Indeed. What bothers me the most is that what we've not got on our hands looks like a win-win-win-win, in terms of architecture, height & density, preservation and planning - something that we very rarely see in Toronto (e.g. Massey Tower) and yet people are acting like this is the worst thing that could have happened. We're beyond spoiled in this town.
 
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