[Halifax] The TED (6290 Quinpool) | ? m | 9 fl | Completed

[Dmajackson]

Halifax Developments Blog (Photo by David Jackson)

[kph06]

This crane was being removed today. Based on the lonely crane bases around other sites, I suspect it will be up again shortly.

[RoshanMcG]

[RoshanMcG]

[coastalkid]

[Dmajackson]

Halifax Developments Blog (Photo by David Jackson)

[OldDartmouthMark]

The "3M" cladding is a nice change over what the norm has become for new buildings lately. I think they should keep it like this.

Kinda gives a pixelated pinkish hue from a distance...

[Dmajackson]

Halifax Developments Blog (Photo by David Jackson)

[Dmajackson]

WEBSITE - Occupancy is January 2023.

[Keith P.]

Seeing a lot of whatever that cladding is these days on many new buildings. Not a big fan.

[eastcoastal]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Seeing a lot of whatever that cladding is these days on many new buildings. Not a big fan.

If you're talking about the upper floors... I can't tell if that's ceramic or some kind of metal panel, but you're right, it's feeling pretty ubiquitous at the moment.

[Arrdeeharharharbour]

I think it's metal siding. If so, it's a quality product. However, covering an entire tower with it looks awfully cheap. TED had the possibilty of being a decent looking building. Looking at it now I just write it off as another failure on Qunpool.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

I think it's metal siding. If so, it's a quality product. However, covering an entire tower with it looks awfully cheap. TED had the possibilty of being a decent looking building. Looking at it now I just write it off as another failure on Qunpool.

So many new buildings are grey with maybe a bit of colour somewhere, like the gold on the George, or maybe none at all. There is such a volume of new construction that the overall effect is quite blandifying. And there are a lot of old vinyl-clad buildings that don't seem to be getting much attention even though demand and prices have shot up so much, like the church in the shot above.

There has also been a trend toward applying this modern style to old houses, covering them in black or grey siding and stripping off ornamentation. Example:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.6401...7i13312!8i6656

It doesn't look terrible but it's a loss of historic character. The left house went from having a local style with Scottish dormer to being completely generic. The 2009 version was already likely stripped down. If you spin the camera around you will see a duplex in behind that got a great sympathetic renovation. Imagine how nice the city would look if that were the norm for older wood buildings and some new construction projects used the same palette.

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

I think it's metal siding. If so, it's a quality product. However, covering an entire tower with it looks awfully cheap. TED had the possibilty of being a decent looking building. Looking at it now I just write it off as another failure on Qunpool.

I happened to be on Quinpool yesterday so I drove past this development. I don't know what the upper floors have for cladding but it looks as generic as the picture indicates. The podium has what appears to be a grey brick cladding although I could not tell if it was actual brick or premade panels that try to look like brick as we have seen elsewhere. It seemed quite subtle in terms of detail so I suspect it is panelized.

[OldDartmouthMark]

There are lots of generic buildings throughout the city (any city, actually) that are indicative of the time period in which they are built. They are unremarkable and tend to blend into the streetscape as to be almost unnoticed as time passes. However, they are places that people will call "home", which is the point of building them in the first place.

This will be one of those buildings.

[Arrdeeharharharbour]

ODM, your post makes me feel a bit sad/discouraged. You seem to be suggesting that xMas wraping paper may as well just be grey as its intent is just to obscure a gift; and why add spice or colour to food as the intent of food is just sustenance. I'm going to use your post as an opportunity to point out that the advertising industry in Canada alone this year is expected to be worth $4.3bn! Images are important. The way things look has a measurable affect on humans. This isn't to say that every building out there has to be a masterpiece of elegant design, but it is fair to critize poor desing and to expect better in our shared public environment.

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by Arrdeeharharharbour

ODM, your post makes me feel a bit sad/discouraged. You seem to be suggesting that xMas wraping paper may as well just be grey as its intent is just to obscure a gift; and why add spice or colour to food as the intent of food is just sustenance. I'm going to use your post as an opportunity to point out that the advertising industry in Canada alone this year is expected to be worth $4.3bn! Images are important. The way things look has a measurable affect on humans. This isn't to say that every building out there has to be a masterpiece of elegant design, but it is fair to critize poor desing and to expect better in our shared public environment.

Arrdee,
I'm not suggesting any such thing. I admire good architecture and finish materials as much as the next person (or maybe more), and have long wished that the architecture on our newer buildings could have the care and attention to detail that many of our older buildings (i.e. Victorian/early 20th century) had.

I've often criticized the lack of imagination/shape/colours/materials of newer buildings, and agree that such criticism is very fair - if it's out there for the public to see, there is no shame in sharing your opinion of it. In fact, I'll go as far to say that many of the new buildings that people gush about on this forum look somewhat crappy to me, but that's just my opinion and it doesn't carry any more weight than theirs. I complained bitterly when the Maritime Life Building was replace by the very bland "The Doyle", yet others seemed to like it very much. Etc.

Coming back to my post above, there was a similar discussion a few years back on this forum, whereby I expressed my disappointment with numerous buildings that were being put up, but other posters reminded me that sometimes buildings are just built to serve a purpose, and perhaps don't need to stand out, but just be contiguous/harmoneous with the surrounding neighbourhood. And it makes sense - buildings are built on a budget with available materials and in a style that's attractive enough for people to want to live there, even if it's not over the top beautiful. Analogous, perhaps, to people loving a bright red Ferrari, but accepting the utility and anonymity of a grey Camry.

So, perhaps this is just my resignation to reality vs idealism. I don't enjoy looking at the Clayton Park Specials of the '80s and '90s, but recognize that they do have a place and a function. I'm not excited about this one either, but we do have a housing shortage and this will help to alleviate it a little bit... and so life goes on.

[someone123]

There are many, mostly heritage, "background" buildings that fit harmoniously into the cityscape without standing out as monuments or landmarks but offer a lot of interesting detail and character up close. I think the big problem with a lot of new buildings is that they are designed on the scale of overall massing (the planner view; how many meters tall etc.) but don't offer much to pedestrians on a human scale (what do you see when you are standing next to it and looking at it, and as you walk by). Partly this ties in with modernism in architecture that tried to strip off what was seen as unnecessary ornamentation. Part of it is due to cost cutting and cheap maintenance. Part of it is due to municipal planning rules that don't distinguish between roof heights and the height of ornamentation, and so cause developers to choose between a dome/spire and losing one or more floors.

NS and Halifax tend to have denuded historic buildings and a utilitarian attitude compared to a lot of other places with a similar level of economic development and history (e.g. Maine; I am not talking about Paris). Something like the surface parking next to Province House really is out of step with what you see in most places and a good example of what I'm talking about. I think this is a fixable issue and wouldn't be that costly over time but there has to be effort and money put in. Maybe attitudes will change a bit if NS continues to grow.

[Hali87]

Yeah I'm not really a fan of that type of cladding in that kind of context. The white looks a bit better than the grey IMO. I find the horizontal gaps don't make any visual sense when the whole surface is so flat, and seem like they should be either more consistently spaced, or more varied, but just... not like this.

I find that a lot of new developments handle texture very awkwardly. This is one of the worse ones IMO, along with the second Sister Site and the second half of the Velo on Gottingen. The materials are so flat that they look more like medium-amount-of-detail renderings than like real life. They look hypothetical, even once they're fully built.

[edit: in all three of these cases this is more of an issue with the upper floors, and actually I find the lower floors on the Cunard side of Velo to be better than average in terms of texture and the way the materials were used.]

On the other hand, if that type of paneling is cheap, low-maintenance, and energy-efficient, that reduces costs somewhat which is an important consideration these days IMO, and overall I do kind of like how well it ties in with the KFC/Pizza Hut next door

[OldDartmouthMark]

Originally Posted by someone123

There are many, mostly heritage, "background" buildings that fit harmoniously into the cityscape without standing out as monuments or landmarks but offer a lot of interesting detail and character up close. I think the big problem with a lot of new buildings is that they are designed on the scale of overall massing (the planner view; how many meters tall etc.) but don't offer much to pedestrians on a human scale (what do you see when you are standing next to it and looking at it, and as you walk by). Partly this ties in with modernism in architecture that tried to strip off what was seen as unnecessary ornamentation. Part of it is due to cost cutting and cheap maintenance. Part of it is due to municipal planning rules that don't distinguish between roof heights and the height of ornamentation, and so cause developers to choose between a dome/spire and losing one or more floors.

NS and Halifax tend to have denuded historic buildings and a utilitarian attitude compared to a lot of other places with a similar level of economic development and history (e.g. Maine; I am not talking about Paris). Something like the surface parking next to Province House really is out of step with what you see in most places and a good example of what I'm talking about. I think this is a fixable issue and wouldn't be that costly over time but there has to be effort and money put in. Maybe attitudes will change a bit if NS continues to grow.

True, however, many of what are now heritage buildings were seen as typical and generic in the period in which they were built, even the ones that included ornamentation. The difference as I see it is two-fold: (1) As you mentioned, modernism has resulted in a public acceptance of bland buildings. (2) Modern construction practices tend to optimize for low-cost, which IMHO means readily-available pre-fab materials that can be installed quickly.

Perhaps this is exaggerated in Halifax, where low-cost minimalistic structures seem to be a tradition. Can you provide examples of new buildings in other cities that illustrate your point?

Frankly, I don't like much of the modern construction I've seen locally, and actually find it a little soul-sucking to drive around and see what is being built now, but have to step back and realize that we are adding desperately-needed housing, which can't be a bad thing. So even if I don't like the aesthetic, it occurs to me that bland buildings that tend to disappear on a streetscape while providing housing has to be taken as a positive overall.

I can complain all day about how ugly I think the Quinpool building is, but this will have zero effect on what is being built here. This will be the way forward as long as buildings like this satisfy code/development requirements, and the developers continue extract the desired profits from the venture (a perfect business case). Whether people on an SSP forum like it is not really a consideration.