Welcome to Bad Buildings, Torontoist's new resident (anonymous, outspoken) architecture critic. Bad Buildings will appear every Wednesday.
Hi there. So glad you could make it. Then again, you didn't really have a choice, did you? This being Toronto, bad buildings, alas, are all around you. Which is why we at Bad Buildings exist—not merely to chastise, decry, ridicule and spite (though there will be plenty of that) but, ultimately, to make our own selves obsolete.
Here's the thing: We believe in a better built Toronto. But we look around, from the grotesquely disproportionate green glass condo forests of Cityplace to the ill-advised, inappropriate, insensitive and, frankly, architecturally ass-end proposed condo-fication of the Queen West Triangle, to any number of egregious aesthetic and contextual failures in this, our beloved city, and we despair.
Bad Buildings believes the time for polite discussion is passed. Bad Buildings is pissed—at slapdash developers who sell out our neighbourhoods with cheap condos to make a quick buck (are you listening, Liberty freakin' Village?), at lazy architects who do their bidding, and worse, use their award-winning portfolios for the occasional half-assed job and chuck crap on our streets on the public dollar (are you listening, KPMB?), and maybe most of all, at simple-minded, high-level bureaucrats who bigfoot our city planning department and stick us with senseless, context-free construction all over our hometown (are you listening, Ontario Municipal Board?)
Bad Buildings believes in a simple credo: Build Better. We don't know why that's so hard to do. Some have: Bad Buildings sees hope in scant few projects around town, like the proposed, long-awaited do-over of the Lower Donlands, won by a team lead by Michael Van Valken Associates. The good lord knows when we'll actually see any of this stuff, but Bad Buildings believes in credit where credit is due. It has vision, of a better city for all. That takes balls—something this town has always lacked.
Until our planners, designers and architects can grow a set and get with that oh-so-simple program, we'll be here to remind them when they're not. But don't worry, folks. Bad Buildings really wants to be your friend. Build better—please—and we'll be buddies in no time. Bad Buildings loves you. But it's a tough love. A hard love. At times, an ugly love. The time for molly-coddling has passed. (Bad Buildings always wanted to say "molly-coddling").
More than anything, Bad Buildings implores you, the caring citizen of this town we try so hard to love, not to remain silent. Get angry. Say something. Do something. And tell us: You set 'em up, we'll knock 'em down. Maybe together, we can make this burg a better place to be.
If you like what we do, you can be a friend of Bad Buildings on Facebook, and/or catch our semi-regular rants at the Bad Buildings blog. Participation encouraged!
Photo by sevenine from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
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The initial Liberty Village project of townhouses and commercial space actually lost money, which is why (I'm assuming) they initiated the second, more dense, set of projects.
Makes sense -- fiscally. But we find it hard to imagine why it becomes a matter of civic policy to stretch zoning guidelines for developers who miscalculate their margins ...
Just another example of the priorities that rule citybuilding here -- the wrong ones.
Great! This is exactly what Torontoist and Toronto needs. I can't wait to see this column as it unfolds. There is so much discuss. And much to be done.
Three cheers to Torontoist for creating B A D B U I L D I N G S.
Maybe if we find enough like-minded people in town, something can begin to change.
Great column - we need a Bad Buildings in Liverpool too! Construction is the order of the day there - a whole 100 acres is currently shut off as the cranes march across the landscape. That's a big chunk of a fairly small city centre. There's some really ugly stuff going up - lots of our racehorse-owning cousins across the Irish Sea have been buying up chunks of housing and land and gaily 'gentrifying'.
This is great.
Oh thank God for this column!!!
Kudos to you Torontoist for starting this. It gives me hope that there are enough people outraged enough at the pathetic, dismal, unacceptable state of affairs in Toronto that we can come together and work to build a better city for our future.
Thank you! Thank you!
I just checked out the puglys at pugawards dot com.
Great idea, but the website is annoying as hell to navigate around and they barely scratch the surface.
I'd like to take a second while I'm here to vent about how atrociously ugly the new opera house is and how disappointingly lame the ROM is. Crystal age? Uh, no. Aluminum siding age? Yep.
The criteria for public buildings should be simple: will people want to take a picture of it? If not, then start over, you lazyass architects.
This is fantastic. We need to educate the public and raise awareness of how appallingly low Toronto's standards are. Thank you for starting this.
Perhaps down the road Torontoist could organize some events around this topic with architects, journalists, politicians, designers etc which would help raise awareness even further.
Cheers to you! Thanks again.
From the Liberty Village Website, the marketing minds say
" You're in the city and the city's in you. It's you. It's a lifestyle that all comes together here at Liberty Towers.
Liberty Towers rise above it all in Liberty Village. Located in the coolest neighborhood of King West -- you'll be part of an exciting hub of activity connected to the pulse of the city. Walk to hip boutiques and restaurants along King and Queen St West. Walk to the lake. Walk to work. Great views from your balcony. It's all here, just waiting for you to move in and start living in Liberty . "
They must imagine the potential buyers are developmentally challenged. But the, who wouldn't want to be a part of an " exciting hub of activity. "
Imagine all those amazing hip boutiques.
Isn't looking at the outside only part of the analysis of whether a building is good or bad? A building and its architect create a space inside as well. Architecture is not sculpture - there are interiors that have both functional and aesthetic purposes. One needs to also assess whether the inside is successful (functionally, aesthetically) and to what extent it is (could it have served these purposes better?).
Yes, the building has an external relationship with its environment, its streetscape etc, but one needs to take a holistic view of the building. I hope we will get some views that include non-external assessments as well.
RE: Greg Hogan's comment on interiors
An excellent point, Greg, and one we address in our most recent post on our personal blog (see link in the column).
In the context of city-building, though, we are chiefly concerned not with just the outside of a building as it might exist in a vacuum -- like, as you say, as though it were a sculpture -- but rather, the complex relationships a building has within the city it inhabits. To belabour a favourite, how it sites itself in the context of a cityscape.
At the moment, this is our major issue, and complaint: The underminign of planners by developemnts that may or may not be ugly, per se, depending on who you ask -- taste is a very personal thing -- but rather the woeful disregard for the urban fabric, and the impact such buildigns have on it.
Further to your point, a "good" building isn't good just because it's pretty -- it's good because it acknowledges, hopefully with grace, its surroundings and its impact on the built environment. We address some of that in our personal blog (see link in the column), in the post titled 'mistake by the lake.'
So, yes, the exterior does not a building make, but taken together, cohesively, a building needs to succeed on all fronts to be a success -- interior, exterior, and contextually. Far be it from us to dictate people's tastes (OK, sometimes, maybe); but bigfooting irrelevant, and usually enormous structures into the urban ecosystem is somethign we cannto abide. Nor will we.
But we'll go inside, never fear. Steer us somewhere, and we'd be happy to check it out. Cheers, BB
Dave - I suggest an extension: Will people want to take a picture of it in 15 years?
I fear much of today's 'starchitecture' and 'critiques of contemporary blah blah blah' will look dated relatively soon, but we'll be saddled with them for decades all the same.
Part of what seems to be ignored here is exactly how complicated it is for an architect and developers to get it 'right'. Within a densely packed urban centre like Toronto, expansion has nowhere to go but up. And so, as more property goes up for sale and gets knocked down, the only thing that will be going in its place is a building which is much taller and is able to offer more space. Developers are not so concerned with its synergy as they are with its profitability. What better way to add profit than to add more floors?
If one of Bad Buildings qualms is the verticle direction the city is taking, I believe you should be less focused on architecture and maybe take aim at that which is Urban.
(Forgive me if I am wrong in this assumption of your interests, I derived it from your stance on 180 Queen St W)
Hi medic --
Thanks for the comment. Bad Buildings has been around architects for a long time, and we appreciate how hard it is to 'get it right' -- what with managine costs, clients who think they know what they're talking about, very specific programmatic requirements, and then, somehow, making 'architecture' from this messy brew.
Incredibly, though, some do. Plenty, in fact. We have precisely no qualms with density; we encourage it, in fact. Bad Buildings embraces urbanity, and all the glorious vitality and difference it (ideally) brings with it.
But towers are hard. Very, very hard. So few have gotten them right over the years (though Mies did all right, we think). But it is precisely *because* towers are so hard to do well that we have to *demand* more from their builders. They are to become the dominant urban form here, and elsewherew, as the population continues to grow. Neither you, nor we, not anyone, we think, should be content with Cityplace-like nightmares.
Density as a necessity? Density as a get-out-jail-free card to rend neighjbourhoods asunder, and erase all the good that is? We should say not. There are ways to do this. In this profit-driven era of tower development, we're just not looking very hard, are we?
As an ex-pat developer now in New York, I can say that "bad buildings" are a universal problem in North America. Private-sector development and good architecture/urban planning are very hard to do in combination but oh-so-easy to criticize. I look forward to rebutting many arguments made by readers here in the future on this topic.
I think you've been a little too hard on KPMB for 180 Queen. I look at it from Parkdale on a regular basis - it's tall enough that it's prominently in the skyline, and it is a pretty addition. It looks even better when viewed from the downtown core, either on foot on Queen [at City Hall] or glimpsed through the cityscape, or seen from above in an office tower [if you get a chance, try to see the city from the southwest corner of the atrium on bay, it's unbelievable - civic, legal, health, residential, commercial, entertainment, communications, education, and financial buildings are all displayed]. KPMB works hard on all their projects, both creatively and in actual elbow grease labour, and I would imagine this to be a case where the client just hobbled the project with a lack of funds. Also, KPMB projects have beautiful interiors, sometimes even when the exterior is more functional. Given that it's a Court building, the requirements for security, accessibility, and functionality probably trump making it look pretty on the outside. Justice is blind, if you will recall; she don't care what the building looks like if it works.
Justice ought to be blind, Andrew, but students, critics, afficionados -- to say nothing of practitioners! -- of architecture should NOT be!
As we said in a previous comment, taste is a very personal thing. It's ok to like 180 Queen -- heck, we probably like things you don't either. And that's all okay.
The root of our criticism, though, wasn't necessarily our aesthetic displeasure -- ok, that was part of it -- but rather, the building's proportions, both internally, in terms of the unlike volumes welded on to one another, and externally, in terms of the neighbourhood it inhabits.
We've seen some truly great large-scale, practical development inhabit small scale neighbourhoods from time to time (american architect Stephen Holl is particularly good at this); we just really felt this one was ham-fisted. It looked like a quickie -- not terribly thoughtful, kind of thrown together -- which is part of the reason it seems so put of place, no doubt.
As to KPMB -- you take the good with the bad. They've authored some decent structures (despite the oohs and aahs at the Gardiner, for example, we're kind of underwhelmed) and some stinkers, too. We think they get too much credit, frankly; as far as corporate architects go, they're not bad; architecture in general? Merely inoffensive at best, in our humble opinion -- and occasionally offensive, too.
We have a whole column planned for KPMB, where we'll explain ourselves more fully. But we're grateful for your comment, and glad to have your voice included! All best, BB
Dear DGThom --
Good to hear from you, and we're pleased to have a voice of dissent aboard -- no, really!
We have to wonder a little bit, though, why you say "private-sector development and good
architecture/urban planning are very hard to do in combination;" is this to say that private sector development has little interest in "good architecture/urban planning?" Or is there something else about these as competing interests?
From our point of view, the relationship should be fairly clear: A city has a master plan -- density, mixed use, height restriction, whatever -- for all its various sectors, and development that fits that plan should be welcomed.
The problem we see here -- and elsewhere, certainly in New York, which is nothing like the NY we knew when we lived there in the late 90s -- is that fitting in to the master plan doesn't give private developers the ROI they want when plannign a development. As you know, the more floors you can build, the more condos you can sell/rent you can collect. We saw the ratio once, and it was dramatic -- expressed as a cost of the whole, upper floors become very near pure profit.
So: We see developers beign rejected by the city, going to the OMB, making a tokenistic "reduction" that they had initially planned anyway, and the next thing you know, you have the Queen West Triangle -- 24 story towers lording over a neighbourhood composed entirely of 3-story mixed used commercial-residential and single family homes.
So really, the question we have for you is: What is it about "private-sector development and good architecture/urban planning" that need be mutually exclusive? Can both sides give a little more, maybe, to find some common ground? Bad Buildings supports profit-driven construction (capitalism good! housing projects bad!), but within reason. What we're asling for are standards -- it's not so simple as "it's my land and I'll build what I want." We're building a city here -- one we all have to look at, live in, interact throughout and, hopefully, engage. Cheap towers that don't respect the urban fabric -- that would be the "good urban planning" side of things -- shouldn't have a place in anyone's vision of a future urbanity ... shoudl they?
Or to put it more simply, if "private development and good architecture/urban planning" can't exist in the same package, why is it that "good architecture/urban planning" is the one that usually falls to the floor? Because, you know, to us, that just ain't right.
We look forward to hearing more from you. You're always welcome here. Best, BB
A quick guess: the private sector doesn't have urban planning high on its list of priorities. The developer cares about the profitability first and the suitability (I want to say 'fitability') somewhere down around seventh, below things like peer recognition. If the Official Plan is poorly enforced (or absent) or poorly defined, you get inappropriate structures in inappropriate places, and a mosaic of clashing styles. But this can also happen if the OP calls for a location to transition from one thing to another. If high density is its goal, eventually a building that dwarfs what's already there will go up.
You couldn't be more right, rek (see the comment from dgthom, a private developer, who says as much, in fact).
There's no doubt the city is doing its best to allow greater densities -- a necessity, given the coming (anticipated) population bloom. Unfortunately, some intelligent planning by the city, which favours incremental density increases in various neighbourhoods, allowing services time to catch up with steady growth, is beign bigfooted by OMB decisions that drop high density into various 'hoods without any regard for the necessary ramp-up.
As you say, it's hard to blame the OP if it's a) poorly enforced and b) undermined constantly by private developers who put profit well ahead of neighbourhood context and urban planning. We don't understand why these thigns have to be mutually exclusive.
We look at Vancouver, where development is treated as a privelege, not a right, and we think 'why cant' we do that here?' Vancouver offers almost no opportunity to deviate from their official plan. As a result, they get the city they want. Meantime, here, we're stuck with a model driven by pure profit, and almost no regard for city building. That aint' right, no way, no how. Thanks for writing in, BB
Are incremental density increases the answer? With the speed at which condos in Toronto sell -- I don't have first hand experience here, but a friend has been trying to get a place for nearly 2 years -- and the prices they demand because of how few there are, wouldn't it make more sense to slate downtown-adjacent neighbourhoods for maximum density, drive the prices down, and keep people from fleeing to the suburbs?
There should be no zoning and no official plan.
Regent Park was the result of people like Bad Buildings. St James-town was caused by people like Bad Buildings.
Developers, especially condo developers, deal with reality and create what people want to live in. It doesn't fit the theory or the ideology of people like Bad Buildings, but it works. Victorian houses and anything "neo" is also against Bad Building's precepts, but they are adored and that's all that goes up because architects, especially the theorists, hate people as individuals, though they laud the idea of "people".
Mies' work is horrible. Go to TD and see how it interacts with the street. Oh, right, it doesn't... all of the buildings are set back and there's no life at grade except for ByMark and the Duke, both of which aren't at grade for Wellington, which gets a huge mass of retaining wall as the facade for much of the block. I've worked in TD for years and love the buildings as a tenant and to look at, but it's no good walking around the buildings. First Canadian sort of works, but has horrible gaps. The 3 east of Bay work at a street level (Scotia, Commerce, BCE), though going to upper floors at Scotia is unpleasant thanks to the sway.
Finally, our OP conflicts with zoning, and as Stintz notes its used as a way to extract money from developers. If any councillor except for Rae was reasonable, people could build appropriately tall and large buildings, but instead they cater to BANANAS like Bad Buildings and Margaret Atwood. The best idea would be to forcibly evict everyone the BANANAS and the anti-commerce types. Move to Newfoundland, where there's no development pressure because there's no economy and no one works. Would fit great.
You know, far be it from me to stereotype, but if I see a book that has on its cover "No zoning, no official plan, and Mies Van der Rohe's work is horrible; condo developers are the best!", I'm gonna judge it. And my pronouncement is: terrible. Hey, guest, go have fun at BeBloor.