The notion that because the market - or business - is useful in one area that it should have a unfettered hand in others, is ridiculous. It is not as if the people who manage the Distillery area are doing us a favour we have to repay by investing in the area - they did it - and are doing it - to make money.
It's their gamble - nothing I'm about to bow down before, nor be glad to see them go to outlandish ends to achieve.
That said, I'm glad they have done such a good job so far, and that so much has been carefully handled. However, now it seems they are quite likely undoing their own good work.
What made the Distillery Area worth salvaging and investing in was it's historical, integral uniqueness. There are many layers to this site - historical, formal, atmospheric, aesthetic, emotional...and although I am not against the intelligent and respectful insertion of modernism into the area, these new developments seem to intrude into the delicate visual and interpretive makeup of the area, and confuse it.
Modernism does not have to operate a such a gigantic scale to be well done, turn a profit, or provide an enjoyable counterpoint to the surrounding fabric.
It seems to me that we are on the verge of destroying the area in order to save it.
Partly, too, this thread seems to me to be suffused with the anxiety we all feel about a part of Toronto's nature we'd have like to be seen put to rest - the ongoing need this city seems to have to demolish, encroach on, or treat disrespectfully irreplacable and important historical buildings. With the historical board still unable to protect buildings that matter, and the modernist legacy of wholesale demolition of historical stock still just at our heels (The Concourse Building being a recent example), is it any wonder we're feeling some dismay about these towers going up where they are? "Why can't we just leave it alone?" seems to be a well-earned sentiment here - especially when we have a history of tearing down valuable architecture to build anew - even when the parking lots are right next door. Toronto has a practically neurotic need to impose the future on the past - however destructively - as part of our continuous war, first against nature, then other urban competitors. Like all neurosis, it's not rooted in reality. At least not anymore.
I'm all for juxtaposition, surprise, ye olde complexity and contradiction, and even things more bumptious.
But I'm not fond of bulk-store cash-grab architecture pushing aside other more ephemeral pleasures, with that desperate air it has of being a bulwark against some ever-present crisis. A spectre that I'm really tired of having held over our heads in this city.