The amount of work that has gone into recreating the Concourse Building facade, in better shape than anyone can remember seeing it, should not be downplayed. The stonework, the mosaics, the ornamentation at the crown (not just street realm) is all superb. For a building that was losing tenants, which was outmoded in many ways—modern HVAC, communications, and electrical systems, but especially bad in regards to accessibility—and which had generated no viable solutions which could have preserved it (including conversion to apartments or a hotel), this was the best that could have been hoped for, and to my eye, it's more than a simple success.
When you attach something like this to a new build, the questions are always "do we blend the new architecture in?" or "do we set the two apart?" The latter was the option taken by I.M. Pei at the Louvre, and while this isn't quite that, the old and new work here similarly, setting each other off. While the angles and planes of the modern building may look 'clumsy' to you and some others, another camp might choose 'daring' or 'refreshing' to describe their take on them. At the least, they are atypical for Downtown Toronto, just like this arrangement between old and new is. As facadomies go, this strikes me as the best one in town, and a rather shining example that's lifted high above an otherwise mostly motley crew.
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