taal
Senior Member
This is why people who say keep on talking the skyline over the the streetscape make me roll my eyes. 50 floor residential towers with a single floor of retail (Aka The Pinnacle Centre) do not make for a city worth walking through!
Mildly ironic: aA is talking about vibrant neighbourhoods when it continues to design the same wrapped-balcony glass boxes over and over again. Their 1000 Bay project looks promising, but I do wish they'd innovate a bit more.
Enlighten me here; The majority of so called vibrant streets in Toronto are dominated by single story retail use no ? I think I should just leave it at that but I'll go a little further. The majority of 'citizens' could care less about the design of a building as unfortunate as that is, though they do care about the retail use, the parks they add, but generally speeking, they don't care about what's on the 2nd+ floor (e.g. above the podium). I bring this up due to your comment:
... when it continues to design the same wrapped-balcony glass boxes over and over again ...
Back to our vibrant streets, for the most part they are extremely monotone in terms of their architecture. The vibrancy comes from what they contain, their particular retail use. So there's nothing to say you can't produce such a street with endless stretches of wrapped-balcony glass boxes, it should be quite easy ...