Quote:
Originally Posted by O-tacular
I like the crown and the top half but find the weird glass midsection breaks up the flow of the cool facade. Then the Toronto special base that shrinks down and looks completely alien to everything else just ruins it. Why do Toronto developers love to do this so much? It's the equivalent of Calgary's practically mandatory policy of twins.
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In this case, these are actually
historically significant and stately buildings by any city's standard, particularly the Consumers Gas building, which is the Italianate building on the right.
They absolutely should be saved; I can understand why a developer would have made this proposal 4 years ago. This is very valuable downtown real estate - maybe some of the most valuable in North America outside of Manhattan, and it's not surprising to see Manhattan densities be proposed. The difference between Toronto and Manhattan is that in NYC, a developer would have transferred air rights from the historic buildings and built some kind of skinny supertall in the modern, lowrise box in the centre.
Where this practice of retaining the facade feels weird is when the developer spends big bucks bracing the plain brick facade of a non-descript 2-storey warehouse from the 1920s with no ornamentation. You see this more on the outer edge of downtown.
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