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It's interesting that almost all of the truly Modern buildings in that last photo are in Uniacke Square - it looks so jarringly new compared to everything else in that view. Alex Hall at King's also looks brand-new in the first photo but its architecture is pre-Modern (it was designed to match the rest of the campus). It kind of ties into what I think is a fundamental generational difference in terms of how people view the city and development. A lot of the people who are dead-set against highrise development are old enough to remember a time when Halifax was an almost exclusively lowrise, pre-modern city. There's never been a time in my life where there weren't already mid-to-highrise apartment buildings scattered throughout the neighbourhoods. Friends of mine lived in them growing up and they were just a completely normal aspect of the urban fabric to me. On the other hand I've encountered people at public meetings who basically see every large building that's been built in Halifax as an isolated mistake, and haven't really wrapped their heads around the fact that we've been a city that builds that kind of thing for 50+ years now.
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This is interesting. I think there's a lot of truth to the idea that different groups fundamentally think about the city differently and have different concepts of what's "normal", and that this is a factor behind the disconnect between some people thinking a given change to the city is great and other thinking it is awful.
I also wonder though how much the early highrises simply gave highrises a bad reputation in Halifax. Do the people who dislike highrises hate the very idea of any building that is taller than 6 floors or do they think of examples like Fenwick and consider those unappealing? I doubt they would argue that Halifax's historic highrises should be torn down, or would argue that all ritzy Manhattan apartment buildings over 8 or 10 storeys are eyesores.
There was a sort of proto-modern development period in Halifax that went from about 1925-1955. During this period, the Dominion Building was built, the VG, Bethune, Ralston, and some early residential highrise-ish buildings like Spring Garden Terrace. In the 1960's, the lid blew off completely and Halifax got buildings on a modern scale or bigger (Fenwick, Scotia Square, Park Vic). That shift from the 50's to 60's must have seemed pretty crazy at the time. 1965 Halifax and 1975 Halifax were two different places.
Nobody seems to complain about the proto-modern buildings and they don't come up much in debates, but a handful of them are highrises and when they were built they were much larger than everything around them. The VG was a 14 storey structure built in the 1940's that at the time was surrounded mostly by 2-3 storey Victorians.
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Originally Posted by Hali87
I'm curious about the wide buildings at the top of the first photo - is that cluster an early West End Mall?
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Yep. That's West End Mall and the apartments along Olivet Street.