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Should the Queens Park view corridor be preserved?

  • Yes

    Votes: 168 43.3%
  • No

    Votes: 145 37.4%
  • Don't Know

    Votes: 15 3.9%
  • Don't Care

    Votes: 60 15.5%

  • Total voters
    388
Comparing Queen's Park to the Capitol? Ha.
I could care less about the "view". I see nothing wrong with a condo showing up within the same view. Big freakin deal.

You're entitled to your opinion, and I'm thankful you're not making the decision.
Queen's Park not just any other old office building, it's an icon, seat of provincial government and placed at the end of arguably Toronto's grandest avenue this not a trivial issue.
I hope they preserve the view.
 
Preserve the view and just make the condos a different height. The view is too important to be have the interference of condo towers.
 
I'm also in favour of preserving the view. Tall buildings are pretty much everywhere in our city, and I like that, but it's good to have some views appear differently.
 
The fact that Queen's Park sits in complete darkness once the sun goes down does not help to reinforce the importance of this view corridor in our collective minds. Still, there are clearly a few view corridors worthy of preserving and I'd suggest this is one of them. Having said that, we lost the great unobstructed Bay Street view of Old City Hall a few years ago with the horrid Residences of College Park impeding it so I'm not sure how much hope this one has.

Still, if voices are heard loud enough, the province could simply step-in and have the developer find a more creative solution (i.e., make the eastern portion of the site even denser, and step-down the western).
 
Everywhere? Indiscriminately?
Montparnasse+Tower.jpg

No, not everywhere, but that's not what I said, is it?

Montparnasse obviously sticks out like a sore thumb, since it's the only skyscraper in the entire area and is painfully out of context - just like the hideous tower in Grange Park. What I said was that I prefer backgrounds "full of tall towers" meaning a skyline, not a single, lone, misplaced tower.

Let me be more clear. I prefer this:

St.%20Patrick%27s%20Cathedral.jpg


stpats1.gif


To this:

st_pat5.jpg


or this:

St-Patrick-4.jpg


The first two pictures feel very urban to me. The last two make me feel like I'm out in the suburbs or a village in the countryside. I know that many want Toronto to maintain that 'village in the countryside' feel, but I don't. And anyway, as others have pointed out, there are already towers encroaching the view of Queen's Park, so this isn't a Montparnasse situation.
 
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Ramako:

The example you have used is hardly comparable in context to the Ontario Legislature:

1. There are no indication of the importance of the structure as a view terminus, especially from how it is placed in the greater context of the urban fabric (e.g. park-like setting, traffic orientation) - in fact St. Patrick's Cathedral in NYC doesn't even fall right in the centre of a view corridor the way the legislature does for University Avenue.

2. Scale - if you haven't noticed, the church examples you've shown are at least 2 or 3 times narrower than Queen's Park.

3. Photographic evidence - none of the examples show just how building appear right behind a landmark.

AoD
 
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How far south of Queen's Park would one need to be to see the towers poking out above the roof? College? Dundas? Queen? It's not like they'll be shadowing the lawn and statuary out in front. Would it actually be visible from sidewalks or just from raised postcard views or by people in vans in the leftmost northbound lane of University? There's a difference between sort of encroaching on a view and totally trouncing it and I don't know which this is. A rendering/model/diagram would assist...has one been posted?
 
There is one in the Globe along with the article showing how it will look just south of College (Gerrard, I think) - the tower basically stuck out like a sore thumb.

AoD
 
Ramako:

The example you have used is hardly comparable in context to the Ontario Legislature:

1. There are no indication of the importance of the structure as a view terminus, especially from how it is placed in the greater context of the urban fabric (e.g. park-like setting, traffic orientation) - in fact St. Patrick's Cathedral in NYC doesn't even fall right in the centre of a view corridor the way the legislature does for University Avenue.

2. Scale - if you haven't noticed, the church examples you've shown are at least 2 or 3 times narrower than Queen's Park.

3. Photographic evidence - none of the examples show just how building appear right behind a landmark.

AoD

You're right, they are hardly comparable. Queen's Park is much larger than St. Patrick's and is surrounded by green space. So if anything, the effect created by these towers would be minimal by comparison. My only point is that I prefer skyline backgrounds over blue sky backgrounds.

How far south of Queen's Park would one need to be to see the towers poking out above the roof? College? Dundas? Queen? It's not like they'll be shadowing the lawn and statuary out in front. Would it actually be visible from sidewalks or just from raised postcard views or by people in vans in the leftmost northbound lane of University? There's a difference between sort of encroaching on a view and totally trouncing it and I don't know which this is. A rendering/model/diagram would assist...has one been posted?

If I'm not mistaken, you can see the top of the Four Seasons to the right of Queen's Park in this photo:

QueensPark.jpg


Anything substantially taller would stick out. I'd personally enjoy seeing several tall towers forming a mini skyline behind the legislature. At that distance, they wouldn't overpower the legislature, but would act as a backdrop. Again, that's just my aesthetic preference.
 
Yes, the hotel already sticks out. It's still a bit tough to tell how much more condos will stick out...and where. Driving up University, the towers may be far enough to the right of the central block that there's sky in between, which, depending on their design, may not be horrible. From the perspective of someone walking up the west side of University, however, the towers might be placed behind the tall central roof, which may be horrible.

The problem with some ruined view corridors isn't simply that something has been built behind it, eating up the sky, but that what was built is not a suitable colour or material, or is off-centre or asymmetrical. Queen's Park is huge, surrounded by large trees and a circular road...it's much tougher to design and position something that fits in, but at the same time its site plan causes its views to probably be more forgiving to intrusion than something like Old City Hall's clock tower, which always had a more constricted and framed view corridor.

I consider things like the massing of the buildings at the corner of College & University a far greater disruption to Queen's Park's aesthetics than a potentially more intruding background where an intrusion already exists...clockwise from 'Foster''s Pharmacy building, we have square, curved, square (probably), and curved. Yeah, that worked out great. If memory serves me correctly, University's boulevardization has already caused Queen's Park to be shifted over from the centre of the street. The current views aren't pristine, though that doesn't mean we should bother trying to maintain them.
 
I don't mean to be aggravating, but I'm genuinely trying to understand: why is protecting a singular viewpoint so important? How is this conversation any different from someone in a high rise complaining at a neighbourhood meeting about their 6th floor view being wrecked by a new condo going up a block away?

Archivist noted that "it's good to have some views appear differently." What other reasons are there for preserving viewpoints? I don't see why they are important (see above example), but I'd like to understand since there are many here who support it.
 
That's exactly what I was about to ask greenleaf. What is so important about a view terminus? Is it only about the way it looks for photos?
So that the building shows off in some sort of proud important way, that no other building can touch?
 
Setting aside viewpoint for the moment. I just find anything taller than the current hotel as inappropriate to its surroundings. I do understand its technically a downtown address but I also see the CBD's density and massing extending from one side of downtown to the other as some envision as hell on earth.

What other reasons are there for preserving viewpoints?

It's the legislative building for the province of Ontario. Can we not take pride in being a provincial capital by making Queens Park a focus point rather than burying it behind towers? (of course it will take more than two towers but that neither here nor there)
 
1. There are no indication of the importance of the structure as a view terminus, especially from how it is placed in the greater context of the urban fabric (e.g. park-like setting, traffic orientation) - in fact St. Patrick's Cathedral in NYC doesn't even fall right in the centre of a view corridor the way the legislature does for University Avenue.

Actually, though maybe not "the way the legislature does", St Patricks does climax a familiar "view corridor", i.e. that looking E down Rockefeller Center's Channel Gardens.

Though if we're speaking of NYC, we mustn't forget the ultimate in "ruined" view corridors, i.e. Pan Am/MetLife looming over Grand Central...
 

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