from today's T&T:
http://22864.vws.magma.ca/index.php?&article_id=11165
New project coming to Victoria Street
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
Times & Transcript
By: Brent Mazerolle
Architect balances philosophy with financial realities in development
A decades-long revitalization of Moncton's downtown mapped out by more than 100 community volunteers in a 2006 visioning exercise has been slowly paying dividends, and here comes another one.
A new building just approved by Moncton's urban planning department for the corner of Botsford and Victoria is the latest in a string of projects that are making the days of embracing any development just for the sake of downtown development a thing of the past.
One of the most important recommendations that came out of that community visioning exercise was that the city demand higher standards of urban design from developers. The city is looking for more than the typical vinyl-sided, four-storey, cookie-cutter-style apartment building these days, and the challenge for developers has been to find innovative ways to up their game while still making the numbers work for the banks that finance them. Those vinyl apartment buildings and big-box businesses may be bland, but their cost per square foot ratios make investors smile.
The three-storey, mixed-use building coming to Victoria Street will face south toward the side of St. Bernard's Roman Catholic Church, one of the city's most magnificent buildings. It will feature the ground floor commercial space the City of Moncton calls for in its downtown zone, as well as two upper floors of apartments.
Parking will be hidden behind and underneath the building, so that the streetscape is focused on the building, not an expanse of asphalt. Its siding won't be vinyl, and perhaps most interesting of all, the building's facade will include a work of public art, something few private developers have done in Moncton. The Caisse populaire at the corner of St. George Street and Highfield Street, and Cecil D's clothing store on Church Street are notable exceptions, but for the most part, in the absence of bylaws requiring public art that are common in other Canadian cities, Moncton's public art has tended to be funded by the municipality itself.
Perhaps most important of all, it won't look like a dozen other buildings around the city, because the plans have been designed locally rather than bought online.
In Cité Realty, whose name is a playful and classically Moncton blend of English and French, is the developer. Christian Hébert of Design Plus Architecture and Interior Design is the architect.
He said it was during his architectural studies in Montreal that he really came to appreciate the healthy aspect of urban living, something he's striving to capture in the new building where he will actually be one of the tenants.
'We found that living in the city, close to where we work, play and shop, was for us quality living,' he said.
It's not just about something as abstract and subjective as 'quality of life' either. It's about the increased fitness and better health that come from getting more of the daily exercise we don't always notice, the business of simply getting around under your own power. It's something he said he's particularly aware of because of his wife's work as a physiotherapist.
'She and most of the medical community now believe that regular exercise and eating well are the most effective treatment in preventing all the major illnesses - cancer, heart disease, diabetes and so on.' Hébert said that's nothing new, of course, but rather something old that's been forgotten as North American cities throughout the 20th century became increasingly designed around the automobile.
He recalled once seeing a documentary made by a school colleague that showed a typical suburban family getting into their cars inside a garage and heading off to work and school and appointments and shopping malls and the like, only to discover at day's end they've spent almost all of their day indoors.
The return to a dense and diverse downtown, where people most days can do the things they do without cars, is something Hébert and most civic leaders desire these days, and this latest development should reflect that.
for those of you with a short memory, this is the project that the article is referring to. I'm very glad to see that it has been approved:
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