Toronto Nathan Phillips Square + Spirit Garden | ?m | ?s | City of Toronto

Urban-Affair said:
Good use of sarcasm.

Also, build Toronto in the 13th century, like Amsterdam.
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Don't worry about that. Most of the cheap-shit investor/speculator crap that has been built in Toronto over the last 20 years wont last 1 century never mind 8.

Imagine, if you will, the 100th anniversary of CityPlace. Ok, to make it somewhat more believable - the 50th. Demolition crews descend upon the mistake by the lake..Various buildings around town are being condemned. People are asking "Why are so many buildings being demolished?" "What were they thinking at the beginning of the century?" "Why were they allowed to build so much substandard crap?" "Where are we going to live?"

While the people in Amsterdam will still be living in their 13th century homes.
 
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CityStay said:
Don't worry about that. Most of the cheap-shit investor/speculator crap that has been built in Toronto over the last 20 years wont last 1 century never mind 8.

Imagine, if you will, the 100th anniversary of CityPlace. Ok, to make it somewhat more believable - the 50th. Demolition crews descend upon the mistake by the lake..Various buildings around town are being condemned. People are asking "Why are so many buildings being demolished?" "What were they thinking at the beginning of the century?" "Why were they allowed to build so much substandard crap?" "Where are we going to live?"

While the people in Amsterdam will still be living in their 13th century homes.
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Say what you will about the way that Cityplace looks, I've sure been a critic of its design. The streetscape along Bremner could have been a lot more engaging, for example. But the reinforced concrete highrises being built today will last centuries easily. They're more structurally solid than anything built in the medieval era. A modern highrise can last essentially indefinitely with proper maintenance. Criticisms about the quality of Toronto's public spaces have a lot of merit, but your post about Cityplace is nonsense.
 
raptor said:
Ok, the harsh reality is that people consider it art. The dumber we make our art the better, I guess. I didn't think our city needs "advertising", I think it's pretty amazing without the stupid sign. Instead of dumbing art down, maybe the city should invest in quality public art (no turtles if you do know what I mean), or even better, public spaces (looking at you - half finished Nathan Phillips Square).
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Meanwhile, whither Henry Moore's Archer...
 
Johnny Au said:
Oh, and Toronto needs canals. Ontario Place, the Toronto Islands, and Villiers Island aren't enough.
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Let's have Steve Martin settle this with his famous quote, "Toronto is just like New York but without all the stuff."

Toronto needs more stuff and not in 800 years. A major planetarium? Botanical gardens? (The tiny one Edwards Gardens doesn't count.) A winter garden? A Toronto Museum? A second AGO campus, built from scratch? Another observation deck, aside from the one at the CN Tower? A central library? (The Reference Library is not the same as a central library.) We need all this stuff and more, for tourists and locals.
 
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Good news.

www.thestar.com

Battered TORONTO sign to be replaced by permanent new letters — at a cost of $760,000

The city says the new sign will be easier to clean, waterproof, and have “augmented lighting capacity and other creative features to support public engagement and interaction.”
www.thestar.com www.thestar.com


However the culture of austerity at city hall continues to look really bad on us, as highlighted in is part of the article.

In less than a year the sign racked up more than 122 million global “social media impressions” — views and online shares. But City council in 2016 balked at spending money to replace and improve the $100,000 installation.

One councillor volunteered to fix the TORONTO sign himself, another wanted to “privatize” it, while a third proposed the city try to sell it. But council eventually agreed to issue a tender for a company to make a new sign, paid with city reserve “rainy day” funds. The city’s cost for design and construction is $490,000. Removing the old sign, installation, wraps, a three-year maintenance contract help bring the total cost to $761,842. Toronto is welcoming public donations to help defray the costs.
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If you want to get political about the symbols attached to the TORONTO sign, take it to one of our politics threads. Other posts in this thread in that regard will be considered trolling.

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Would it be possible to criticize the maple leaf and indigenous symbol additions on the grounds that they’re visual clutter, or would that be forbidden speech? Because one of the objectives of the NPS rebuild was de-junking what started out as a wonderful and spare example of mid-century modernism, and the Toronto sign additions seem to be the start of a re-cluttering process.
 
Those two elements of the sign, separate from the letters, each come with a ton of symbolic freight that will be next to impossible to subtract from the debate. Even if some of those writing can successfully do that, others will not, and the whole thing will just become an exercise in pushing others' buttons, so, NO, anything more in that regard will be considered trolling in this thread. Take those things that are freighted with politics to a thread where people are expecting politics.

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They’re assembling it today.

Bad news: they still built a podium for this thing. I’ve always said that while the sign was great for its international attraction and social media photogeneticity, the Toronto sign has acted as a barrier to the pond/ice rink.

The sign should have been remade as individual letters that you could walk in between, maintaining the porous nature of the square. Instead, they’re just replicating the old sign with longer lasting materials.

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The covering around the letters 'n symbol is weirdly trippy. Is that temporary?
 
Apparently it is a temporary wrap observing United Nations’ International Decade for People of African Descent (from the quoted tweet above).
 
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