Looks a little like what the Eaton Centre could have been rather than the BS suburban mall that was pitched to city council decades ago. Good to see we learned from our mistakes. Well done!
That is...quite a claim...
The failure of the Eaton Centre was not so much its interior space which was reasonably original and urbane in its initial iteration.
The failure, admittedly, was its relationship to the surrounding streets, most acutely, Yonge Street.
No question that aspect of the development could, and should, have been handled better.
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The Well equally has a nice interior (semi-exterior/open-to-the-air) space. Perhaps, when all said and done it will definitively surpass the original TEC interiors; I think it's fair to say the skylight is superior. But I think it may be premature to pass judgement on the balance just yet.
On the exterior, certainly, there are some warmer and more varied treatments than those on the original TEC. But will they actually serve to animate the streetscape with vibrance? Let's hope so; but again, I feel like we're getting a bit too far out front.
The one exterior space I think we can easily award extra points to is the public park/POPs/Streetscape on Wellington. The rest is a bit more TBD.
It's worth saying that TEC is so far from what was first delivered, as is the surrounding area, that it's very hard to draw fair comparisons.
Just try imagining 'The Well' across from several peeler bars, and open drug dealing etc etc. that would have been the case in the 70s.
So Toronto does have people who can lay pavers
