Quote:
Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere
The new building is actually quite good for a new build - if not award winning. It's got a lot of decent retail spaces and is fairly well detailed at grade.
Early versions of the development had proposed heritage retention, but what got built went away from that for whatever reason.
The original building had also been abandoned for a very long time prior to redevelopment.
Hamilton's main restaurant street, which is pedestrianized in the summer months, is going from this:
https://i.imgur.com/H5qK4Ti.png
to this, with restaurants at grade:
https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/thread....27790/page-21 |
Meh, not impressed. I see lots of spandrel, banded glass balconies, chunky massing, black plastic colour blocking, and pre-cast brick panels with random colour changes to give the illusion of narrower street frontages, and no logical cohesion between podium and tower. Brings to mind
YC condos in Toronto (also a G+C project) - IMO one of the worst towers built in this cycle.
The retail frontages look like they could be decent, but it's still completely out of scale with its surroundings and devoid of context - a low-rise, vernacular retail street
like this wasn't really calling for a pair of 30-storey towers to spruce it up. The King St. frontage also would have been better served by a restoration to the existing heritage building with a mid-rise addition above & behind. This development looks more appropriate for a suburban TOD or something.
I remember seeing renderings for the McMaster graduate residence some years ago and being excited for it, but the execution of it is a bit disappointing. The metal cladding appears to be more of a dull grey than the
champagne bronze that was originally shown, and there's a whole lot of spandrel on the window sections. Nice brick detailing at ground level though.
Augusta Block does look quite good - I actually thought it was a restoration of an old warehouse with an addition on the top. Impressive that it's all new construction - though it makes the choice of the juxtaposed faux-historic and modern sections all the more baffling. Not sure why they didn't just continue the traditional brick motif up to the top 3 floors.
This new-build faux-heritage loft building next door is really well done though.
In any case, Hamilton's a city with some great bones. It could be a lot better if more of it were built like the above two rather than importing the worst development tendencies of the 905. Smaller-scale mid-rise buildings that reinforce the existing character of the city would go a much longer way in filling its gaps in the urban fabric than generic towers do. The same problem seems to exist in Kitchener, Ottawa, and pretty much everywhere else in Southern Ontario - where I'd maintain that the quality of new development, outside of central Toronto (and even there, it's maybe 50/50 at best) is almost all uniformly terrible.
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