[someone123]

I believe this one was shaped by the ramparts bylaw, and that's why there's a roof slope up and away from the Citadel shared by both buildings.

I think the ramparts bylaw should simply be dropped. It's not a good trade-off. It's basically a ban on landmark highrise buildings downtown in exchange for minimal benefit. It also distorts heights in a way that makes little sense from an urban planning perspective. Downtown Halifax for example should have taller buildings up the hill and shorter buildings down the hill to maximize light to and views from the buildings. It's very hard to do staggered heights with Halifax's low downtown height limits, and there is no mechanism to enable the small-scale variety in height that would naturally happen with market-based building heights.