Have you seen the current proposal for the lot beside View Towers? An interesting building was proposed for that same property more than a dozen years ago. It was sent back multiple times.
There's no wiggle room here, the current situation is 100% the fault of city admins and politicians. The wheels were falling off the "evil developers are ruining Victoria" narrative in the later 2000s, so it's as if the CoV took it upon itself to extend the old controversy by deliberating enforcing blandness with prominent new projects. The idea that they would have micro-managed every aspect of every development for so many decades and then been completely blindsided by the spandrel issue or the panel cladding issue is simply not believable. It's actually very absurd.
As I noted earlier, the design panel's advice for HP2 was
more spandrel, not less. They actually called for
more spandrel and
less brick on one of the city's tallest new buildings. I'm not making this up.
See? We told you! Tall buildings are drab and cookie-cutter generic! (because we required them to be drab and cookie-cutter generic, even though the initial proposals were pretty sharp)
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900-block View Street. Rejected proposal from 2008-09 on the left, current proposal from 2020-21 on the right. You know how that old proposal was criticized for being too tall and having too many units? This new proposal is taller and has considerably more units. And since the current proposal is also very generic and bland, it has a great chance of getting approved. Because why should the development process be sensible or consistent? The development process should be nutty and confusing and self-contradicting. Otherwise there would be no such thing as development controversies anymore, and then what would politicians do?
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