Arch Record: A Conservative Outlook for TO Offices

[building babel]

I love King and Bay on weekends during the summer when nobody else is there. I visit Oscar Peterson Square and look up at the big towers and I know - I just know - that Mies designed them just for me, and not for the transient hordes of office workers who clutter the streetscape from 9 to 5 Mondays to Fridays.

Aaron Copland's Quiet City plays in my head. I stretch out on the back of one of Joe Fafard's coos and gaze heavenward.

 

[adma]

Downtown NYC is dead on weekends too.

Not only that, but the bulk of the old-school street-level retail (think Broadway/Nassau) is just as dollar-store scuzzy...

 

[spmarshall]

"I went to photograph the St. Mary Axe building in London on a Sunday, and for blocks and blocks and blocks around it, there was not one business open. I mean, nothing. At all. We have no corresponding area in Toronto as dead or as empty that I've ever seen."

Yep. I found even Downtown Detroit on a weekend is much more lively than the City. Though it was interesting checking out the Lloyd's headquarters and Swiss Re with me being the only living thing around.

 

[adma]

Interesting thing to consider: that even the most universally reviled of Toronto's PATH-type complexes, the Hudson's Bay Centre, is far, far healthier from a retail and pedestrian and buzzing-spontaneous-activity perspective than a lot of those overconceived 70s/80s-style downtown malls and festival-marketplaces in the USofA...

 

[Ed007Toronto]

Of course the surrounding areas are much healthier than most US downtowns. I had the pleasure of walking down Yonge Street tonight from St Clair to Queen. It went between 6 and 7PM. The sidewalks and shops were all busy. Reaffirmed what a great town we live in. Can't wait as more buildings are built and those like The Met start to fill up.

 

[roch5220]

I don't think theres anything wrong, nor blame to be placed. But if there were to be blame, I would blame the TD center, they started the modern financial financial core, with their sleek, modern, first tower that emphasized the tower on a pedistool type footing ignoring at grade retail probably because it would take away from overall asthetics of the tower from the outside. The rest of the TD centre built in a similar fashion anchors the whole core.

 

[Bogtrotter]

Bruce Kuwabara, a founding partner of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, Toronto, and one of Canada’s most prominent architects, says the three new towers do not challenge the city’s architectural fabric because “after a long drought in office buildings, neither Toronto developers nor the market can make a big statement about design.â€

What does he mean by this?

 

[building babel]

I think he means the prevailing mood is that we're grateful for any new big office towers at this point, after going without any for such a long time; as a consequence of the long drought good design isn't a priority with either developers or "the market" whatever that is.

 

[adma]

Torontoist re PATH