I would say Arts Court and the OAG is as hostile if not worse. I don't think the St-Laurent site road condition should be a reason not to build new housing at that location. Maybe one day the parking structure at St-Laurent will be demolished and more housing will be built in its place.

I don't think roads themselves are what make an area hostile. (Unless you are talking about a 20 lanes crosswalk) It has more to do with the lack of immediate destinations. If you have to walk 15min between each commerce, I would classify this as hostile. But if there is proper/safe street crossing, and enough things to walk to in the immediate surrounding, I would call that non-hostile.

So if we define the St-Laurent site as hostile, the solution would be to build more things in the immediate surrounding (such as redeveloping the mall parking structure into mixed-used space).

The mess around OAG is quite bad. Why we need a new east end bridge, but that's another discussion.

At least the streets around OAG (and people will head towards any direction but Waller) are relatively narrow, and outside rush hour, again other than Waller, it's not **too** bad.

I like the fact that they are tall slender towers. 725m sq. floor plate at 30 floors will give it a decent profile. A simple crown or nice treatment around the mechanical penthouse would go a long way. I'd settle for a slanted roof like Envie.

I'm really hoping they don't end up looking like Story @ Chapel or 1960 Scott st.

If they look closer to Frontier I would be pleased. Having seen them both up close multiple times I rather like them.

The mall access isn't great though. From the ground level going through St. Laurent to the parking garage there is no consideration for pedestrians. As others have pointed the sidewalks on the overpass are quite narrow.

Even when you cross the overpass the backside of the mall there has loading docks and narrow sidewalks so your access to transit won't be all that it can be. I would question how well that overpass sidewalk is maintained in the winter. Is it city property or mall property?

I'm not opposed to this project but I think there should be some type of connectivity study done. St. Laurent mall seems to be struggling a little bit and has been for years. Perhaps they could be persuaded to rethink their access from the St. Laurent side which is pretty hostile.

It's unfortunate there isn't a wal-mart or grocery store at the mall. Ditto for the closure of Target down the street. That only leaves Food Basics in a short walk for your staples.

At the end of the day, people will live here! Perhaps when this and the buildings at Cummings and Ogilvie are built along with the 3x 6 floors further up the we will see some change to the neighborhood in regards to cycling access and amenities.

I say build it, but I will be so so so disappointed if I see 30 straight floors of charcoal brick with no treatments around the windows or any type of banding Ala Chapel. Think of how different that building would look if they had just added some simple grey lintels under the windows on the charcoal section.

it would be nice to have a grocery store or Wal-Mart at the mall, especially with the old Sears just sitting empty. But since there isn't, in addition to Food Basics, that same plaza also has an Adonis Market and a Giant Tiger. There's also a Dollarama across the street at the mall.

And while a Wal-Mart would be ideal at the mall, the locations at the Trainyards and at Gloucester Centre are a short drive away. And if you take transit, it's just a few minutes train ride to Walmart at Gloucester Centre

Lees and the Riverside condos at Hurdman are just as hostile, by this definition.

A bit of a larger footprint for both, and the Riviera at least has it's own large resort in the middle of it.

I knew someone on the 4th floor of the Elgin Square apartments, and you might as well be living within the highway median, but he didn't care.

It's a particular type of person who wants to be close to the highway, close to the transitway, and doesn't much care about noise.

I wouldn't mind the ground-floor unit someone suggested earlier, but from about 3rd-10th floors on the south, you're on TOP of the highway. Above 10th, it's not so bad, visually, or sound-wise.

Okay that first rendering I saw didn't look so bad, but this most recent one?

Holy crap, RLA is 100% trolling lol. This is AWFUL. Why is it grey and white???

Ffs lol. Ffs.

Watch out 1960 Scott and 'Story of Mediocrity', there's a new contender in town for ugliest modern project.

Not sure if it could make the MTO standards, but I would love to see the Lemieux and Labelle intersection turned into a roundabout. Traffic could be slowed down in pedestrians would have a link to Cyrville. Also perhaps could be easier for traffic coming out of this development to turn left

You are suffering from an Acute Roderick Laheytigmatism, go see your optometrist
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...uPUQQ&usqp=CAU

we should gather up all the RLA projects that look similar (so all of his projects) and put them on one page and try to have people guess what projects are what.

could rod himself even get it correct?

Oh I wasn't aware of the Giant Tiger. I moved away from that neighborhood a few years back.

There are lot of good connections there with Ogilvie/Coventry/St. Laurent/417. As you pointed out Trainyards/Gloucester Centre being so close. The lack of connection from Tremblay station to Trainyards needs to be fixed when they start building out the site across from the Post Office.

There are some other developments in the neighborhood that slipped my mind earlier. In addition to the large site along Cummings there is also this proposal.

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...=207436&page=3

This one as well

https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=244338

There are also a plan for towers nearby on Coventry rd. although I don't think there is an application.

Michael st. and Labelle have a few parcels of land that could be redeveloped without touching the existing office buildings. The central lawn at Place du Gouverneurs is also untouched.

While on the other side of the highway.. Tremblay road is about to blow up as well. In short.. after 10/15 years this development will just blend into what will be a fairly dense neighborhood overall so I don't think it will be as awkward as it seems.

On a side note... we were chatting about a view of the city coming over the hill leaving Kanata and how the train shed was a bother for some.

One of my favorite view is leaving the 417 split eastbound when you are roughly parallel with the mall, it gives you a really interesting angle of the downtown core. The rising elevation seems to stack up the buildings nicely. This will be an interesting corridor to drive though.

You may be referring to this one: https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...d.php?t=249253

This had me howling.

I just don't know if this could be worse than that bait and switch called "Story of Rideau and Chapel".

The renderings... at least this one already showed it's true colours that it's hot garbage design-wise.

Okay seriously, RLA must have a grey brick fetish. This is the only reason why every building is grey.

Do you all think he designs EVERYTHING grey? Like you know... his table... choice of shirts... TV? Oh no.. he must still have an old grey coloured B&W CRT tv at home...

https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1j6rlm...ale-Formal.jpg (Courtesy of RLA)

That's the one. I think my brain noodle didn't really categorize that as an actual proposal as it is quite vague. It's more in the planning rational type thing but I agree the intent is there.

I was at St.Laurent today and had a few minutes to kill.

This would be your walk from the transit station along the backside of the mall to the overpass.


https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...531198_b_d.jpg

This sidewalk is 30" wide (yes I happened to have a measuring tape) To the left is an expansion for the Royal Bank. There isn't much room to push over to the right either as the busway dips down for the underpass.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...d019eb_b_d.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...e69b7b_b_d.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...11db28_h_d.jpg

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...87ce81_b_d.jpg

Raised curbs here on all sides ??? Get it together St.Laurent!


https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...f9bd6e_b_d.jpg

The one saving grace here would be that this sidewalk is 81" which is decent. This project would need the mall to get their shit together for this routing to be viable. Then again they would rather have you go through the mall.

There is no viable pedestrian connection in the parking garage leading away from the lights at Lemieux either. So something needs to give here on the malls end to call this TOD. Going to be crossing paths with way too many cars in a sketchy way, especially for someone with a disability or children.

Nasty for accessing the o-train on your way to Rideau Centre to shop (because St. Laurent is dead :haha: )

That is quite bad, but St. Laurent has no incentive to do anything about that.

Thank you for these pictures. It really does put things into context.

Like I was saying previously, the new development is not bad location wise.
You also show that the bridge has a decent width.

Now, the issues are definitely on the mall side. There needs to be a better experience for pedestrians leading to entrance #3. For the exterior path leading to the LRT, I don't know how they could fix it. The RBC bump is definitely in the way.

This isn't related to the 1209 St. Laurent project, but this LRT station is very poorly integrated in the surrounding neighborhood. Unless you are coming from the mall itself or transferring from a bus, this station is not very accessible. This responsibility doesn't only fall on the mall, this is also the city's responsibility. They are the ones managing OC Transpo, and they are approving the site plans in the end.

I wonder if they could construct a ped bridge from the St-Laurent overpass directly across the transitway directly to the station median (bypassing the need to walk along the mall's edge just to cross.

But I think a valid question again becomes who pays for this, the city or the mall? The mall doesn't have much incentive to do so...

Man, this is brutal.

Really, the only appealing thing about this proposal is the fact that it's near transit + a shopping centre and yet, despite being easily within walking distance, you are better off taking your CAR, driving 200 metres then parking in the parking lot then walking over.

There needs to be some sort of walking bridge integrated into this proposal to make this viable. I don't see St. Laurent making any change to its infrastructure, given like many other suburban malls, its slowly dying. But it would be awful if the proposal was accepted as-is.