The meeting is over and I'm back home.
The way it was set up, there was time to mill about looking at various boards, then everyone sat down to hear presentations from City Planning and the developer/architects. After that there were 45 minutes to give feedback at various tables set up in the room, and the planners taking the notes at the tables reported back to the room a summary of concerns they heard. After that there were open mike questions and comments for about a half hour.
When all that was done, I pestered a few people for some more nuanced answers concerning changes to the project, and that means I can now better address a couple of the posts in this thread.
But buyers don't care. It's all $$/square foot here. No broader vision for the city or design expectations, save for heritage preservation. If you've got $$, property and zoning, you can build wtf you want. And make false promises about whatever you want, too, apparently.
As I said in a follow-up post above, even though the exoskeleton or cross-bracing was gone from all of the renderings and elevations shown tonight, it might not be gone forever. That is to day that this is not a false promises situation: this is a building that debuted with beautiful renderings at the very beginning of its ride through the planning process, and which is now morphing as it takes various concerns into account.
Is the external expression alone what everyone is mourning?
The entire structural system of the building was shown to be very dramatic, and the cross-bracing created an interesting atrium and ground level experience. Now that's gone, and can't just be added in last-minute as some tacked-on visuals.
You're right, the cross-bracing is not just a tacked-on decoration that can be reapplied at the last minute.
The more nuanced response I got to this was that as a square tower, which is the current but not necessarily final thinking, there is still the intention to direct the load of the building down into 8 super-columns which free up space on the retail levels, as has always been the plan. The condo section of the building will still have an elevator core in the centre though, so somewhere on the building/in the building loads must be transferred from that core to the eight perimeter super-columns. That could mean that the exoskeleton returns, but essentially we are not seeing a new exterior yet because Foster doesn't want to deal with reworking the engineering until the massing of the building has settled. The end result of the tower may be reminiscent of the initial plan in the end to greater or lesser degrees, we don't know.
What is likely to be quite a bit different is the podium, which is shifting mostly to Yonge Street now. It simply won't look like what was first planned as it's not even in the same location. The residential entry and the retail elevators are still on Bloor though, although they connect differently to the tower; the atrium space at this point is entirely different.
So, wherever they end up with this building, there are surprises in store for us. It's still Foster designing one of his tallest buildings, so they'll want something worthy for their portfolio, and it's still Mizrahi going after the highest-end retailers and declaring we will have something to be very proud of. Most people who spoke at the event made it clear that they expect something spectacular here. It's hard waiting for the next version, but we some time to wait now.
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