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Yeah, so, I know I am going to be 'yelled' at but man this condo so far is not looking good enough for its location and bothers me that developers don't care enough about their products in such prime locations. Whether it's this tower (so far) or 88 Scott Street (with grey spandrel above the cream/yellow precast floors - really, why not black!?), or 365 Church Street, or Velocity at the Square, or the 31 and 41 storey towers on Richmond Street (the ones just east of the Scotiabank theatre), etc., the color combinations and the excessive use of spandrel and mullions is surprising and disappointing! This seems to be a much bigger problem in Toronto than other Anglo-world cities (for example, Sydney, Melbourne and Vancouver, not to mention key US cities, have noticeably nicer public realms and designs of buildings)!

I don't get why there's such excessive use of ugly grey (or some derivative of grey) spandrel with silver mullions...at least if there was more black, things would look sharper! Even the Brookfield office towers (the KPMG and Deloitte ones), while they're nice boxes, they're so boring compared to what Brookfield has developed in London, UK and Calgary (the current tower in construction). I don't get why Toronto gets the short end of the stick is so many ways. I care so much about Toronto and its progress and while so many things are exciting about this city, it's so difficult for me to accept these very obvious short-sighted examples of poor design/planning.

Toronto's core, especially, is being treated like sh*t by developers (and yes, I know that many nice developments have come up and that's great but still too many are not nice enough for Canada's largest downtown)! As well, if I forget the Trump Tower issues here (why Toronto, not Chicago!!??), even the new RBC Waterpark Place, with its fallen/broken glass (already!) is perplexing to me. I won't talk about other developments like 10 Dundas East and the reno of the Eaton Centre that are also disappointing/upsetting to say the least!

From a location perspective, the buildings in the 905 (say Missi. City Centre around Square One) and suburban 416 (i.e. South Etobicoke lakeshore condo cluster, North York strip from Sheppard to Finch) are better - relatively - for their location than some of these developments in the much more sought-after downtown core. (By the way, to clarify, I'm saying that the new non-downtown buildings seem to have fewer fails for their relative secondary locations vs. some of these downtown developments, which should theoretically be more refined, urban, aesthetically pleasing and upscale but are not. I am not saying that downtown Toronto on the whole looks worse than these suburban clusters, it's the sheer number of developments that fail to some degree in the inner-core.)

Sigh...Toronto, a city whose biggest enemy is itself! (OK, now bring on the hate.) :(
 
Two builders that should be banned from the downtown core until they pull their heads out of their asses:

Tridel & Plaza.

This condo boom has produced not nearly as many well designed condos as it should have.
 
Yeah, so, I know I am going to be 'yelled' at but man this condo so far is not looking good enough for its location and bothers me that developers don't care enough about their products in such prime locations. Whether it's this tower (so far) or 88 Scott Street (with grey spandrel above the cream/yellow precast floors - really, why not black!?), or 365 Church Street, or Velocity at the Square, or the 31 and 41 storey towers on Richmond Street (the ones just east of the Scotiabank theatre), etc., the color combinations and the excessive use of spandrel and mullions is surprising and disappointing! This seems to be a much bigger problem in Toronto than other Anglo-world cities (for example, Sydney, Melbourne and Vancouver, not to mention key US cities, have noticeably nicer public realms and designs of buildings)!

I don't get why there's such excessive use of ugly grey (or some derivative of grey) spandrel with silver mullions...at least if there was more black, things would look sharper! Even the Brookfield office towers (the KPMG and Deloitte ones), while they're nice boxes, they're so boring compared to what Brookfield has developed in London, UK and Calgary (the current tower in construction). I don't get why Toronto gets the short end of the stick is so many ways. I care so much about Toronto and its progress and while so many things are exciting about this city, it's so difficult for me to accept these very obvious short-sighted examples of poor design/planning.

Toronto's core, especially, is being treated like sh*t by developers (and yes, I know that many nice developments have come up and that's great but still too many are not nice enough for Canada's largest downtown)! As well, if I forget the Trump Tower issues here (why Toronto, not Chicago!!??), even the new RBC Waterpark Place, with its fallen/broken glass (already!) is perplexing to me. I won't talk about other developments like 10 Dundas East and the reno of the Eaton Centre that are also disappointing/upsetting to say the least!

From a location perspective, the buildings in the 905 (say Missi. City Centre around Square One) and suburban 416 (i.e. South Etobicoke lakeshore condo cluster, North York strip from Sheppard to Finch) are better - relatively - for their location than some of these developments in the much more sought-after downtown core. (By the way, to clarify, I'm saying that the new non-downtown buildings seem to have fewer fails for their relative secondary locations vs. some of these downtown developments, which should theoretically be more refined, urban, aesthetically pleasing and upscale but are not. I am not saying that downtown Toronto on the whole looks worse than these suburban clusters, it's the sheer number of developments that fail to some degree in the inner-core.)

Sigh...Toronto, a city whose biggest enemy is itself! (OK, now bring on the hate.) :(

The bar is set so incredibly low. But developers would not build this crap if buyers did something about it. When you produce a spandrel turd that sells out, guess what? You're going to build another spandrel turd.

I'll give the Lamb's, Freed's, Harhays, Great Gulfs, etc credit for the fact that they actually try to build well designed buildings and their names are attached to some of the nicest looking buildings during this boom. I'm leaving many names out but there's way too much crap going up in prominent areas.

I was in downtown Brooklyn a few weeks ago. Had not been there in about 8 years. I couldn't believe what they had built and what they were currently building. We can't compete? Manhattan I get, but Brooklyn?
 
To be fair, I think we get a decent amount of architectural creativity when it comes to design coming from mid-range condo developers. L tower, Exhibit, Picasso, and Aura are a few examples that didn't turn out to be plain boxes, and are fairly expressive coming off the drawing board and fully rendered. Even in the instance of 10 York, Tridel drastically overhauled the initial design (thankfully) into the wedged shape form that exists today, which was most likely more costly to design, construct, and market floorplans. On that front, there is an attempt to achieve something memorable.
That being said, the tipping point with many of these projects tends to fall is with the execution of details, such as cladding. There are many compromises and changes made along the way during the development lifecycle, whether that be budget-related or otherwise. That is not to say that developers are excused for striving away from the architects original vision, but developers are building inventory, not artwork. The rate in which these go up and the rate they sell at in relation to their quality has become concerning.
 
I agree with city lover.
Can't the people responsible for construction make these developers use better quality material?
They're making so much money. No need to treat the city like this. Especially when they're popping up in the center of the city.
 

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