One Young Street, Kitchener. Five floors with planned ground floor retail and a rooftop restaurant, notable for being Waterloo Region's first example of midrise office space built using nail laminated timber.
First photo by tomh009, second photo by jgsz, both on
Waterloo Region Connected.
Render:
This was formerly the site of the Mayfair Hotel, a three story structure built in 1905 with a further three stories added in the late 1920s. It had been empty for quite some time before becoming a victim of demolition-by-neglect in the Spring of 2015. There had been plans for redevelopment that incorporated the original structure that never came to be. Instead, this prime site on King Street next door to city hall sat empty for four years until construction started on One Young last summer.
The demolition of the Mayfair was quite the loss for Kitchener. I had always liked the juxtaposition of the 1905 and 1920s era architecture, and the metal fire escape gave it a gritty urban feel- a relative rarity in KW.
The new structure pays homage to the original with a fritted glass pattern of the 1905 facade, but I'm worried that the execution might veer into cheesy territory. Framing for the glass is starting to go up so we will soon see.
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