They're not trying for beauty or elegance here. They're going for bold, for striking, for impressive. They're getting that, so they don't really need beautiful or elegant.

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junctionist said:
It's unique and relatively sophisticated architecture, but there doesn't seem to be much beauty or elegance to the bold geometry of the design. The forms just jut out at random like a filing cabinet with many small drawers not fully closed. The same could be said about many Brutalist buildings which rely on bold geometric forms: they're bold and sophisticated, but not particularly beautiful.
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That's the beauty of it. I love it.
 
Close proximity to two streetcar lines (three if you count the Cherry extension)? Walking distance of the core? Taller buildings in the immediate area?
 
I don't think you give other people enough credit. This building is designed to cause people to say 'Wow' when they go by it, and based on this rendering I have no hesitation in predicting they will achieve that, and the sales they need to make it happen. Beauty as understood in the classic sense is not the only aesthetic virtue. Daring can be appreciated easily enough as well.

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Brutalist structures are often derided because of their crappy urbanism as well, which isn't lacking here. I personally find Brutalist structures to be quite nice looking very often, but I also find that they very often suffer horribly from actual functionality.
 
JBM's G&M review of renderings:

"If a rendering can be believed, Saucier + Perrotte’s mid-sized building will be among the most artistically exciting high-rises constructed in Toronto since the onset of the condo boom."

"Moshe Safdie led the way decades ago, by strongly articulating units of housing in Habitat, which he fashioned for Montreal’s Expo 67. But, if all goes according to plan, River City 3 will mark a notable translation of the strategy from mid-rise to high-rise conditions. Like every other huge agglomeration of people that is officially trying not to sprawl, Toronto needs high-density residences to shelter its multitudes. The outstanding architecture of River City shows that even massive urban housing schemes can celebrate and express the individuality everyone needs in order to survive the big-city pressure to become bland, packaged, generic."
 
This building has so little in common with Habitat; no idea how he sees this as a high-rise take on the Habitat strategy, whether it's intention, construction tactic, or even aesthetic. But I get the impression that JBM tends to just review how a building LOOKS as opposed to its actual intentions or function or architectonics. So that seems par for the course in his "reviews".
 
These guys and other architects from outside the city need to start getting more work in Toronto. The Toronto based architects always put up the same crap, tired of seeing the same designs.
 
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Adjei said:
The guys and other architects from outside the city need to start getting more work in Toronto. The Toronto based architects always put up the same crap, tired of seeing the same designs.
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I don't know if it's the architects who are at fault. It's the developers. They want the glass boxes because they are cost effective. "design a glass box NOW!"
 
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