Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
Honest to God, what with the whole heritage-property situation on Barrington, I'm not inclined to be very excited on behalf of Mr. Lawen. The apartment building Subway in is a really cool, unique-for-Halifax Victorian job, too. The rest of the block can go, but it'd be great of that were maintained on the corner.
Is it normal for a city to have such a tiny pool of property developers, owning massive swathes of contiguous streetscape? It seems like our development community is dominated by a handful of dudes essentially controlling the built environment of whole neighbourhoods. Reznick has Barrington, Chedrawe has half of Spring Garden, Lawen has the other half. The fact that some of these guys are actively indifferent to the existing streetscape (Lawen's bullshit demolition proposal on Barrington) or have barely been able to put together a halfway-passable building, architecturally speaking (Chedrawe), is becoming a big problem.
The quality of development and architecture has been rising (Southwest, Starfish and Fares Group especially), but the recent crop of proposals for demolition and re-development, especially the Barrongton/SGR corridor, is of extremely dubious value, for the city, IMO. And it's just a few developers responsible.
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We have novice developers demolishing significant buildings from an architectural perspective and then rebuilding novice looking buildings. In terms of demolition there should be stricter guidelines when more than one building is scheduled to be demolished. You would think that this town would have learned a thing or two when dozens of buildings were demolished for Scotia Square and Cogswell interchange.
The BMO block case underlines how vulnerable every building in the city is. There have been several cases lately of multiple buildings being demolished at once. The trillium, the VIC, South & Hollis St. and everyone's favourite Letson Ct. Letson Ct. looks like it is straight out of the eighties and is wearing very poorly. We are destroying Victorian buildings for extremely bland architecture.
Letson Ct.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@44.641452,-6...sJO4AHA25viV3S7LIBPEw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
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