Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
I agree. It sounds like you are referring to the Maritime Centre. I like the view of it from some points at street level but it's an ugly element in the skyline.
It's a creation of municipal development rules in the city. There is a maximum height limit over that site and then there are viewplanes on either side of it, so it was built as a squat cereal box shape and set at an angle to the street. The municipal bylaws and the people who made the rules in past decades (80's and earlier) basically did not care about skylines or considered them a bad thing to be minimized. I wonder if this attitude is changing. I get the impression issues like housing affordability and urban vibrancy are more salient now.
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Another factor is the nature of the protected views themselves - they're public views looking downward from a hill that sits above Downtown. Contrast this with somewhere like Vancouver (protected public views, but mostly looking
upward toward the mountains) or San Francisco (higher prioritization of downward/outward views from
private spaces, ie. from inside buildings, which is conspicuously not-a-consideration here). The result in Halifax has been a lot of wide, squat towers at the bottom of a hill where a lot of other cities' view priorities would tend to encourage the opposite. Although there's a certain irony that so many buildings here have ended up so
wide, ostensibly to protect views
I have mixed feelings about the Maritime Centre itself and it tends to look better from some angles than others. It contrasts nicely with the Maple, although for a long time it just stood resolutely on its own at that end of Downtown, giving a stark "edge of the continent" atmosphere that's less pronounced these days. I'm curious to see if it ends up getting fully reclad/refreshed.
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