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Top 10 Toronto Restorations

B

buildup

Guest
Until recently, I was resigned (not unhappily) to Toronto's development future as being essentially focussed on great looking towers of various styles.

But I'm increasingly excirted about some great restorations: What you you add to:

Conservatory
MARS
Fine Arts building at Spadina Crescent
Distillery area
Gladstone hotel
 
It would be hard to top the National Ballet School on Jarvis Street: two old mansions incorporated into a modern structure without losing their identities.
 
its a couple years old, but the fire station tower is the most striking to me (west side of yonge, just north of college). it had a pretty good tilt to it before they did all that work

and also, they've done some very nice work fixing up old city hall
 
MARS
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If you're speaking in strict terms of *restorations*, that one's compromised by the lopping-off of the end pavilions...
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The two wings on the end were not part of the original building.
 
Yes, they did a good job fixing up the fire tower, but by covering the rest of the building with that horrific stucco, any credibility (and dignity) it might have had has been lost.
 
Though the base had already been degraded beyond recognition many times over, to the point where it's practically an irrelevant footnote to the tower--which perhaps is better off at this point as a surreal free-floating erection. Maybe, paradoxically speaking, the more cheap and banal the base, the better...
 
The two wings on the end were not part of the original building.
Click to expand...

But close enough to the original, and visually integral all the same--part of the "long long building" effect. And, hospitals being hospitals, they had the look of being "allowed for" within a multi-staged master plan.

Not that, relatively speaking, they're an ultra-tragic loss; but IMO there may, arguably, have been a smidgen of "misunderstanding" in visualizing that TGH north wing as isolated pavilion rather than continuous wall...
 
Yes that's true, but at least a mirror glass facade wasn't trying to be historical.
 
Er, i meant to say "BEST seen at event with drink in hand" -- as it was meant to be.

I didn't mean to sound so....awful.
 
I would agree that there has been a spate of credible re-uses lately.

No one has mentioned Police Station 51, so I will.

Within the Distillery District, the re-use of some buildings by the Young Centre seems particularly well handled.

There's also the Palais Royale, which will be completed sometime this summer (or is it already?). Surely that would have been an endangered building.

My vote for worst re-use of a building, however, is the Church of Christ Scientist now tucked beneath the horrible Highpark Condominiums.
 
Shawn, you lush.

How about Old City Hall? We rarely discuss it here, but the exterior has undergone a beautiful and sympathetic restoration - returning the stonework it to its original splendour. It gets even more admiring glances from locals and tourists than it did before. It is in a class of its own as an example of a massive renewal project that doesn't rely on adding new structures to give it cachet. The restoration hasn't just improved the building, but Nathan Phillips Square -one of the great gathering places of the city - as well. And a forum member may work in the belltower.
 
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