Canadian Skyline Thread III

[TorontoDrew]

I'd put Tour de la Bourse or Le 1000 de la Gauchetière ahead of Place Ville Marie. Place Ville Marie can be a little lost in the crowd because of it's location and it's muted colour.

[Zepfancouver]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

For the last 30 years London did have a marque building, One London Place. As noted though, it now seems lost in the jungle with so many buildings having gone up in the last few years. For ages, Calgary has Petro-Canada Centre and Toronto FCP but now they are just lost.

Personally, I think Canada only has one truly iconic post-war office tower, Place Ville Marie.

I agree, Place Ville Marie is my favorite Montreal building. It was my first observation deck experience way back in 1976 at 12 y\o and made many return visits, the Bonaventure Theatre was our go to movie night.

[J.OT13]

From the Ottawa Forum.

Originally Posted by AuxTown

Couple of cellphone pics from today. This view has changed so much and will change a ton more in the next 2-3 years!

[TorontoDrew]

Slow Season at Cherry Beach by kotsy, on Flickr

[Nouvellecosse]

That's a very cool angle. And I love how that white metal structure near Aura in the image almost looks like a skyscraper at first glance.

[cranes]

Waterloo

https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/2...t-206-waterloo

[WhipperSnapper]

Kitchener keeps up the surprises with powder blue spandrel and red brick trim.

[MonctonRad]

Nevermind

[zoomer]

/\ by Nirvana.

These are a little on the big size, but that's Facebook photos for you.

Photo by Murray Sharratt on Facebook,

April 18 - Sunrise over Victoria and the Cascade Mountain range, Washington State. Taken from Albert Head, Metchosin.



Victoria, March 26th by Murray Sharratt:



April 12th Pink Moon, photo by Doug Clement:

[Wpg_Guy]

Originally Posted by cranes

Waterloo

https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/2...t-206-waterloo

This photo has the same vibe as this one of Winnipeg

[kool maudit]

Having joined this forum in the very late 1990s, it is dispiriting to see that the generational shift towards urbanism that began with our extolling the virtues of celebrated prewar districts in the world's great cities has brought us here.

These joyless, cynical buildings erected into the paradoxical, quasi-permanent "housing crisis" that emerges from our sterility/immigration dialectic.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

Having joined this forum in the very late 1990s, it is dispiriting to see that the generational shift towards urbanism that began with our extolling the virtues of celebrated prewar districts in the world's great cities has brought us here.

These joyless, cynical buildings erected into the paradoxical, quasi-permanent "housing crisis" that emerges from our sterility/immigration dialectic.

We could certainly preserve our pre-war heritage while still densifying our cities, but it seems like more housing anywhere has taken over the collective thought process, as if we don't have an abundance of parking lots and empty fields to re-develop.

I understand that some cities are actually running out of space (maybe the big three, but certainly not the rest), but there are ways to preserve heritage none the less. And new suburbs should be inspired by the denser streetcar suburbs of the past, which could also take some pressure off older areas.

Unpopular opinion no doubt.

[WhipperSnapper]

Never believed in the generational shift towards urbanism but, was still enthusiastic emerging from the dark and gloomy 1990s and see surface parking replaced with development. Afterall, investors were driving construction of those early condos.

At some point, height lost its novelty and scale got out of hand. Despite, turn of the century towers each having their own unique flare, Charles Street East, the Entertainment District, the emerging Corktown, St Lawrence Skyline look like grey blobs or supertall Kowloon Cities. The history and character developed/ intensified for 100 years that isn't block busted for some retained facades is lost in the grey weeds.

Forums have always been pro development and socialistic however, I don't recall being at the level where a single family property was considered elitist and sound planning principles bastardised to maximize population densities (warehousing) at the cost of standard of living or quality of life were celebrated.

[TorontoDrew]

I think I joined in 2000, I remember back then being excited about a 40 storey tower. At that time Vancouver had all the development. I agree with your take on the joyless buildings going up.

[WhipperSnapper]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

We could certainly preserve our pre-war heritage while still densifying our cities, but it seems like more housing anywhere has taken over the collective thought process, as if we don't have an abundance of parking lots and empty fields to re-develop.

I understand that some cities are actually running out of space (maybe the big three, but certainly not the rest), but there are ways to preserve heritage none the less. And new suburbs should be inspired by the denser streetcar suburbs of the past, which could also take some pressure off older areas.

Unpopular opinion no doubt.

How big do we want our cities to get? There's diminishing returns the bigger and denser you go. However, the larger a place, the greater the chances the market can support residential skyscrapers and supertalls which is why the forum was created

The temp population has increased by 2 million in as little as five years. They represent 6% of the population. The housing crisis is a delusion.

This growth concentrating in the big 3 or, big 6 or, big ten, to correct the planning errors of the past (block busting central neighbourhoods for surface parking) is seen as a big win. The conversation that towers are being built on these lots that replaced low density housing within the same grid (as developers aren't generally giving up privately owned space to the public boulevards) is not in the conversation.

We need to look at new districts in China with large block housing and massive boulevards because accommodating this massive growth through intensification of existing cities is insane. Planners demanded plus 15 expansion into the One Yonge development as the public boulevard sidewalks were deemed to have not enough capacity for the complex's population to move around. This is in Canada. It's absurd that we have tighter spaces than the densest, land constraint, countries.

[hipster duck]

Let's not get too nostalgic. 20 years ago forumers would complain about the state of contemporary architecture too, but would cite different aspects of the design. The windows in new developments were that dark green tint caused by high iron oxide content, which was cheaper to produce. People complained about cheap window wall construction with narrowly-spaced mullions that cut up windows into tiny squares. Many buildings were "faux Chateau" with cheap concrete precast accoutrements like turrets, doric columns and even gargoyles.

On the inside, the units were more spacious and usable, though.

[LikesBikes]

Those developments in Winnipeg and Kitchener would look substantially better if there were just some trees around them. Architecture is important but you can mask an ugly building pretty well if the fundamentals are okay - i.e. not fronted by parking, not too homogenous, not dilapidated, etc. For example, West End Vancouver are mostly just kind of smugly apartment buildings that only look nice because of the context they're in. Montreal is different, but get rid of all those trees and the Plateau begins to look more like the ghettos in the northeastern US.

[Zeej]

Originally Posted by LikesBikes

Montreal is different, but get rid of all those trees and the Plateau begins to look more like the ghettos in the northeastern US.

Lol. Hyperbole much?

[hipster duck]

^I get what he's trying to say.

Even Victorian rowhouse neighbourhoods can be soul sucking if there's a lack of greenery or if the homes are basically carbon copies of one another for entire blocks. That's a problem in a lot of working class terraced home neighbourhoods in England and in some Eastern seaboard cities like Baltimore. The fact that those cities have issues with crime and abandonment adds insult to injury, but even if every house was occupied they'd be pretty sterile.

Architectually, the Plateau is saved by a few things, beyond the fact that it's lively and the people who live there have personalized their homes. Greneery is definitely one, and the second is that there is a variety of architectural styles on any given block.

The walkable, pre-war areas of most Canadian cities are pretty varied and not monotonous. By contrast, a lot of suburban areas of Canadian cities built in the last 30 years are very monotonous, even by the low standards of contemporary subdivisions built by a single developer. I think this gap is one of the reasons why, subconsciously, middle class Canadians like inner city living more than their counterparts in the US or maybe even other Commonwealth countries. It's not the reason, of course - I think things like crime, race, school quality, transit access, etc. are much bigger factors - but I think it has some minor effect.

[kool maudit]

I didn't mean that the buildings going up 25 years ago were great. They were few in number and corny in design. You had things like that "Paris block" on Jarvis Street, and it was not at all odd to see big-box stores pop up in fairly prime locations. It was grim.

In those days, SSP was forced, I guess, to be a little more idealist in its orientation, so there was a lot of talk about what made great areas great, and a lot of talk about Jane Jacobs-derived considerations like "windows on the street" and "streetwalls". We were essentially trying, like her, to quantify something like Greenwich Village in the hopes that its like might be built again.

In the quantification came some of the corner-cutting, such that by the time we were beginning to see actual urban construction in the sort of second- and third-tier cities that found it novel, we often allowed that the new projects still offered "densification" or "walkability" despite being pretty fucking far from Greenwich Village.

This was the Bush era, the Richard Florida era for us, and we were willing to accept "urbanization" as an end in itself*, even as the urbanity in question was pretty fucking far from the scenes that make people join forums like this.

We have now seen quite a bit of urbanization, and quite a bit of population growth in areas that the 70s, 80s and 90s had left for dead. These were the areas that were kind of the mental canvasses for early SSPers.

At its best, the 21st century urban boom in North America created some livable central spaces in former dead zones. It did not create anything glorious. In Canada, Griffintown is probably the best, which is due mostly to its legacy streetplan and fabric. Liberty Village is OK. CityPlace is not great.

Downstream from there, it is more or less a mess, with haphazard, Cities Skylines-looking structures trying to stuff themselves with whatever chain retail they can find, with a Rexall or something being the top tier. But it has some density, I guess.

I think it is fair to ask, having built so much, why so little of it is of any aesthetic value?

(* I mention Bush because this did have a political valence, and the view was that these spaces would be castles for the sort of "open society"-type values and voting patterns that did not win the day in 2004. What was the name of that lifestyle magazine the Economist did? That sort of thing. The trajectory of that has gone on to be very central to pretty much everything, but there are a million other threads for this.)