I would much rather have something in a far more prominent location in the city.
There's one Union Station, and it's not exactly portable. It's in as prominent a location in the city as it's ever going to be.
Unless you're expressing the hope that Metrolinx, a government body, should have taken the money they were given to improve transit, and instead cut a cheque to someone to build an OMGSUPERTALL!!ELEVENTY!! at Yonge and Bloor, so there could be better "dollars per observation"?
I am extremely dissapointed and consider this one a failure. We could have gotten so much more impact in so many other places than somewhere the overwhelming majority will never go and the tiny minority that do will spend only moments.
It's the busiest passenger transportation facility in the country. In fact, it could quite possibly be the most visited building in the country on a daily basis: I just went on a bit of a weird Google digression and it's ahead of the Eaton Centre and West Edmonton Mall but couldn't find how the Rogers Centre or the ACC do in aggregate over the course of a year. In any event, there are few or no buildings in the city where the quantity of people seeing the interior are
less of a "tiny minority" than this one.
Every building ever built is seen by more people outside than inside, so I'm really puzzled by this stance that architecture only has value inasmuch as it can impress a large number of people passing by outside and to hell with how it is perceived by people who use the building as intended.
(And yes, they're there for a relatively short period of time, but by that logic there'd be much fewer beautiful train sheds anywhere in the world.)
My only regret is that the new section didn't replace the old trainshed in its entirety, I honestly don't care that this trainshed is historical, it's ugly. And I like the AGO-esque look, even if it is done on the cheap.
We go through this every five pages on this thread. Much as many of us would have loved it torn down and replaced from scratch with a fancy Calatrava, demolishing the whole Bush train shed was never an option with the federal heritage people. The fact that you "honestly don't care that this trainshed is historical" is kind of irrelevant, it was what they cared that determined what had to stay put.
(Sort of ironic when you think about it... back when it was built the Bush train shed was the cheap, utilitarian and forgettable choice for meeting the need, which seems to have carried on as the quintessential Toronto way of building transit. And now that shed is being enshrined as part of the city's historical record.)
Oh, and you probably mean OCAD rather than AGO, and I think the resemblance will always be there but will shrink a little as construction progresses -- as the top structure grows wider (and thus relatively thinner-looking) and gets more glassed-in, I imagine it'll progressively look less and less like a "large box on stilts" and more like a roof.
