^^ You don't want to stay because of its design. It's a very awkward design and sloped. Banks used to make their floors slope up to the counter to make customers feel subordinate to the bank. Sloped floors don't make one feel grounded or want to stay very long. Dundas Square will always suffer from this problem as long as that underground parking garage is there. It should never have been allowed, but we're likely stuck with it for at least a few decades now.
I find Dundas Square more inviting than NPS to be honest. NPS just feels too big, whereas Dundas Square feels 'cozy'. I enjoy sitting and people watching at Dundas Square more than I do at NPS and feel much more comfortable there.
Each have their good points. Dundas Square does feel more intimate and alive, but lacks that sense of grandeur that was needed for such an important site. The sloping nature of the square to accommodate underground parking doesn't help one iota. The square itself is a smashing success (and was much needed), but the design falls short.
NPS ticks off all the boxes that Dundas Square doesn't. It's grand and has a strong sense of place. The new additions really pulled it all together, but it's one downfall is the scale of the buildings surrounding it. For such a big square one needs buildings of large enough scale to balance it out. We have that to the south, but to the east, west, and north we don't. 2 Queen West and Massey Tower will help to a degree to the east, there's not much that can be done on the west unless we see get a 250m+ building replacing Zurich one day, which leaves us with the north.
We're employing the wrong approach when it comes to views to the north. Instead of reducing heights of buildings behind City Hall so we can't see the city we should be doing the exact opposite. It's almost eerie looking north. Where did the city go? We need substantial height to the north, northeast, and northwest when one stands in NPS to make the square come together and provide a big city vista to the north that matches the terrific vista to the south. AURA helped a little, but it's too far away to have a big impact. We should have gone a lot taller with Motion, not chopped it so we couldn't see it.
All is not lost. There are still opportunities to recover from this mistake with that lot to the northwest of NPS at the southern tip of Chestnut. A 300m+ building there would do wonders for NPS by countering the scale of the square. You can't do that with a 50m-150m building. That said, you can't just plonk down a standard condo tower there either. You need something that's as high calibre as City Hall was/is. This lot is where Toronto's future show piece skyscraper needs to go. A Zaha Hadid or Nouvel tower would be perfect here, but you need to go tall so the square can play off the height.
Regarding NPS, it would be even more intimate/cozy if the wall of billboards on the north side were double the current height. It's too short and squat. Perhaps they could hire someone with a sense of proportion and scale this time?
