Ugly Canada 2 (Only architecture, planning and design faux pas)

[stevanford1]

Originally Posted by O-tacular

That made me think of another ugly trend I’ve seen involving pickup trucks. Garages are no longer exclusively used to store vehicles it seems. So many houses I see now use their garage as a a hoarding zone and park their pickups, atv’s etc on the street or in their driveway. Then there’s the case of one of my neighours whose truck is so ginormous he can’t even close his garage door and has to leave it hanging outside.

I used to have a neighbor that put everything in his garage to the point where it could’ve been marketed as a self storage unit. Old washing machine? Into the garage it goes, old mattresses? The garage can handle it. He also used to park his pickup truck on the street.

[MonkeyRonin]

I personally think it's kinda cool, but I know some of you will surely get a kick out of this prison-like complex tucked away in a back alley of Toronto's east end: https://goo.gl/maps/CYDAyJV4wvG2

[stevanford1]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

I personally think it's kinda cool, but I know some of you will surely get a kick out of this prison-like complex tucked away in a back alley of Toronto's east end: https://goo.gl/maps/CYDAyJV4wvG2

Are you sure that’s not in Norilsk?

[suburbanite]

The separate covered staircase with exposed walkways screams British public housing to me.





from:https://www.dezeen.com/2014/09/24/br...no-goldfinger/

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by isaidso

They look like Canadian versions of British row houses which also tend to have 100% concrete right up to the street. Georgian row houses can somewhat get away with it as the architecture is attractive. They also have sidewalks.

This is very popular now in UK infill where previously there was tenament housing.

https://goo.gl/maps/HQk7F8MLLpK2

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by suburbanite

The separate covered staircase with exposed walkways screams British public housing to me.





from:https://www.dezeen.com/2014/09/24/br...no-goldfinger/

Usually the setting for a grizzly murder for Luther to figure out.

[stevanford1]

Originally Posted by suburbanite

The separate covered staircase with exposed walkways screams British public housing to me.





from:https://www.dezeen.com/2014/09/24/br...no-goldfinger/

And that in turn reminds me of the Genex Tower in Belgrade.

[niwell]

Not the building that Monkeyronin posted, but I had an urban planning history prof who lived in a Co-op building in the area with exposed walkways solely for the social aspect of it. Weird dude but definitely the opposite of a hypocrite when it came to his planning beliefs.

May have bee this one: https://goo.gl/maps/jCU2o1tkTsF2

[O-tacular]

A ketchup and mustard office to residential conversion in Calgary.

[stevanford1]

Originally Posted by O-tacular

A ketchup and mustard office to residential conversion in Calgary.

Very bad. Those panels make it look like some form of control panel.

[stevanford1]

Lethbridge City Hall is pretty bad.

[HomeInMyShoes]

^It's at least got some reasonable proportions, balance in window layout. Sure it's that great 80s brown brick and smoked-glass window treatment and I'll definitely give it ugly points for the saving of the old city hall entryway as a Minecraft portal to the nether. And then there's the big wall of brick and window and 0 lack of interaction with the street.

Okay, it's pretty bad.

[stevanford1]

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

^It's at least got some reasonable proportions, balance in window layout. Sure it's that great 80s brown brick and smoked-glass window treatment and I'll definitely give it ugly points for the saving of the old city hall entryway as a Minecraft portal to the nether. And then there's the big wall of brick and window and 0 lack of interaction with the street.

Okay, it's pretty bad.

, and you are 100% right about it having 0 lack of interaction with the street, from streetview it looks like a giant brick jail.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.69370...7i13312!8i6656

[stevanford1]

That's not to say its not the only ugly building in Lethbridge. For example this building also has zero street level interaction and just looks plain old hideous.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.69703...7i13312!8i6656

https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.69701...7i13312!8i6656

https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.69634...7i13312!8i6656

https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.69592...7i13312!8i6656

[suburbanite]

Main city streets that use perpendicular parking like this grinds my gears. Right around the corner from that Lethbridge building.



Luckily most of small-town Ontario avoided this. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is Southampton.



It makes the road 20 feet wider than it needs to be. I realize a lot of this street was probably built circa 1900 so it wasn't like they demolished anything to add the parking, but how much sweeter would it be for a beach town to have patios/public space running up the length of the main strip?

[rousseau]

Wide streets always suck. Look at Harbour Street in Kincardine to contrast. It's almost a genuinely charming little maritime lane.

Almost.

[suburbanite]

I have a soft spot for Kincardine having spent a lot of my childhood summers with family who live there.

Harbour Street is fantastic. The difference in pedestrian scale is obvious.



Even with the tacky wall painting, I love walking down to the water from the top of the street.

[rousseau]

It's good for Canada, I guess. On the whole, we just don't do charming as-all-get-out pedestrian-scale streets. Like in the UK, for instance.

The best we have are in Quebec City and Old Montreal.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by suburbanite

Main city streets that use perpendicular parking like this grinds my gears.

Luckily most of small-town Ontario avoided this. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is Southampton.

Mitchell is another example.

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.46800...7i13312!8i6656

Funny, you go 20 km further down the road and you get to Seaforth, where if you didn't look or turn left you'd miss seeing this:

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.55329...7i13312!8i6656

That's a pretty impressive downtown street for a little town of 2,000 people in the middle of the southwestern Ontario countryside.

[suburbanite]

What was going on in these towns in the 19th century that there was enough horse and carriage traffic to justify such wide streets?