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17 Comments

news

The Stacks Are High

By Andrew Pulsifer

20080731Stacks.jpg
A month ago, Torontoist noticed a poster showing an interesting building that was supposed to go up over the Berkeley Church. Sadly (for some), this place was not meant to be. City bylaws got in the way of that stacked behemoth, but have no fear, architecture enthusiasts! The building pictured above has complete city support and will be an undeniably controversial sight at Richmond and Widmer streets on the former lot belonging to Joker Nightclub in the Entertainment District.
Urban Toronto forum member ProjectEnd clandestinely took a cell phone photo at a meeting at Metro Hall last month, hence the low quality. The rendering is an initial design, with the final building looking pretty much like it, but not exactly. It is being done by TAS Design Build, the folks responsible for other—albeit considerably more boring—Toronto condos such as M5V and Zed, and Teeple Architects, famous for the University of Toronto’s Graduate House and other funky Canadian designs. A media blitz is expected at some point, but we just couldn’t wait to share this. Expect outcries and kudos, but it doesn’t matter because this is being made. Now, who wants to play a giant game of Jenga?
Photo courtesy of ProjectEnd from the Urban Toronto forum.

Comments

  • Miles Storey

    That actually looks pretty cool, I hate the condo-style architecture predominant in the city but this would be something fresh. It’s going to be really noticeable too, there aren’t many tall buildings around that area, if any.

  • Vaneska

    Beautiful building, but another residential building in the Entertainment District? If you want to life there, fine with me. But don’t complain about the noise, traffic and 905ers.

  • Mark Ostler

    Seems like it could be something out of Blade Runner, with the exception of the plants.

  • pman

    This looks like an amazing building. The cr*p that gets approved in this city and the project was shut down by a by-law??? Could somebody please explain why the municipal government didn’t just get out of the way and approve it?

  • Loozrboy

    Somehow, I suspect the building that actually gets built will look a lot more boring than this rendering. Also, what an awful location for a condo!

  • rocketeer

    Looks like (possibly because of the image quality) the lovechild of M.C. Escher and the ancient Mayans. Like most other condos however, it’ll probably look much worse in the winter without any foliage and water streaking down the walls.

  • Lands Down

    Graduate House is the worst building on Earth, it clearly draws significant inspiration from soviet-era bureaucrat farms and penitentiaries.
    This building looks like the end-stages of a game of Jenga, but i’ll reserve judgement. Remember: ‘different’ isn’t always ‘better’.

  • Dillon McManamy

    @Rocketeer – Looks more like a Escher stool sample to me.
    Why is everything in this city so blocky? It’s like all the developers and architects in this city sit around the same table playing with old school Lego all day.

  • deepsaila

    I agree, it is a horrible place to build a condo but the look is different…it sort of reminds of Habitat 67 (http://www.habitat67.com). For all the condos that are out there, its nice to see something that doesn’t look like a chunk of glass and steel.

  • EricSmith

    It’s the vertical version of Habitat 67 that I’ve been waiting for — or at least that’s how it looks in the spy photo. I like it, as long as it has more windows than we can see in this shot, and as long as it brings a little bit of that crazy stacking action down to street level.

  • Skippy the Magical Racegoat

    The clubs are there to stay, but I think some more residential can only improve the neighbourhood. Right now they complain about noise from revelers and not-so-revelers (gun enthusiasts and the cops who chase them), but having some permanent residents with a real investment in the area might offset the out-of-towners who just come by to trash the place.
    It’ll definitely be a bit of a social experiment, interesting to watch.

  • accozzaglia

    I feel like it’s the beast from Peter Gabriel’s music video for “Big Time”, realized on a — pun not intended — massively huge scale. If I recall correctly, the hydra-headed beast stomps to death on a growing plant while Peter briefly appears from behind it and waves hello at its accomplishment before it explodes into something much bigger.
    It almost seems like a New Brutalism is upon us. A Rochdale 2010, possibly?

  • rek

    The proposed tower of loosely stacked glass rectangles tip-toeing over the Berkley Church was fucking horrible and this one isn’t any better. Stacks of misaligned boxes aren’t groovy, they’re characterless, trendy, and destined to make us all facepalm with regret by the middle of the next decade.

  • accozzaglia

    The one planned for Berkeley Church wasn’t terribly earth-shattering, either, but at least the glass façade was less brutal than this bad-retro beast. Also, the Berkeley proposal, replete with stilts, smacked too much of OCAD-itis for it to be particularly noteworthy in architectural circles — provided of course “groundbreaking” was part of their intent.
    Regardless, though, as the city goes more vertical, and vintage edifices continue to get razed, robbing a link to the city’s history, it almost makes more sense to build above history instead of mowing it down and building atop history’s lot. On that one level, the Berkeley project made a modicum of sense. Just, well, that’s not a high-density strip the way, say, Bloor between Church/Davenport and Spadina is rapidly morphing into.
    This Richmond proposal screams like a lovechild of the OMB and free-wheeling developers.

  • AR

    That Berkeley Church wasn’t that exciting. There was no connection or communication between the church and condo.
    Thom Mayne can take the credit for the avant-garde Graduate House. Teeple is great firm, though.

  • atomeyes99

    honesty, what does one expect from Toronto condo architecture?
    anything that does not look like the waterfront condos or like the ones by SkyDome (the soon-to-be-20 condo project for which i do not wish to name) is a blessing.

  • accozzaglia

    Even if that blessing looks like a modern-day, dead-ringer re-interpretation of a Sheraton Hotel or a skyscraper version of Robarts?
    Condo architecture in Toronto is the symptomatic product of there being an entire disconnect between A) city-level planning decisions; B) direct civic involvement with those planners; and C) developers working in concert with those planners (or just going around them entirely to the provincial level).
    What we have instead is the Ontario Municipal Board, which doesn’t have remote interest to change how they allow developer projects to proceed (in Toronto, Ottawa, or even Thunder Bay). We have developers who have time and again taken advantage of land deals dating back to the 1980s which cannot be touched by planning demands and contemporary development provisions of today (e.g., provisions set out in much newer primary and secondary city plans). Largely speaking, the lakeshore is a shining example of this mess.
    And perhaps biggest of all: because there’s such low civic governance over planning decisions or civic leverage over provincial decisions (per Sherry Arnstein’s ladder with its eight rungs of civic participation, 1969), civic involvement in how these projects are envisioned, approved, and deployed really seldom get above the lower three rungs here, when seriously, we should be much higher up than that. In other words, lower rungs mean developers can pretty much have carte blanche with what they want, whereas higher rungs indicate greater levels of citizen control over what happens in their city.
    In effect, these main points evoke a Wild West mentality for Toronto condo developers to just plop down new projects into lots (whether empty or in use) with little prior advance notice to or consultation with the public before those monster ad walls go up around that lot to market the beasts. By then, the basic designs are long since carved in stone (since they need something virtually tangible to sell their units, right?), so any changes to those plans typically can only come from an OMB decision (e.g., Trump tower being lowered several storeys only after the OMB laid down the gauntlet).
    Structurally, there’s not a whole lot we can do or say to change this set-up right now without other fundamental changes happening at Queen’s Park. Since Toronto is constitutionally “a creature of the province”, don’t expect that to change anytime soon.