By David Topping

One of Toronto’s most important intersections is finally on its way to being built back up after being torn down, and one of Toronto’s most doomed condo plans is finally being buried. At the end of last year, we picked the then-empty lot at Yonge and Bloor as one of our Villains of 2009; in the wake of colossal financial mismanagement at the hands of Bazis International, new owners Great Gulf Homes took over the site, only to promise a “typical highrise building,” which Torontoist’s Quin Parker wrote was a “waste.” What was unveiled for One Bloor at the end of March, however, was refreshingly atypical.
No, there was no public square. The Toronto Public Space Committee (with whom we traded tweets) wanted one at Yonge and Bloor, a laudable but implausible plan that went ignored. (Jonathan Goldsbie’s thoughts on the new building and its public-ness or lack thereof, published on Spacing‘s Wire, are worth reading.)
What there was instead was a sixty-something–storey condo, with retail at its feet. The new building, as imagined by Hariri Pontarini Architects, is still awfully tall, and everything other than its retail—including its residents-only seventh-floor terrace—is more than likely out of your price range. What the building does have going for it, and what makes it easier to forget its faults, is that it happens to be very attractive. Sort of wavy, sort of boxy, but not too much of either, the building—at least its renderings (starting here in the gallery above) and its scale model (over on Urban Toronto)—seems to connect with the sky, the skyline, and the street equally well. It’s better than nice enough, which is better than we were expecting. The Star‘s Christopher Hume praised the “changing rhythm of the balconies”; without them, One Bloor would “otherwise be a straight-forward box.”
In four years, it’s looking like Yonge and Bloor won’t be the city’s most valuable parcel of flattened land, or its newest park—or a waste.