Losing this design over this particular heritage building would be a damn shame. What’s being proposed will be genuine heritage in 30 years. What’s there right now is not.
Maybe.
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As noted above, I'm not yet sold the proposed design is real.
FORA has yet to deliver any of its ambitious looking proposals, I'd like to see at least one go forward so I can buy in....
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Second, while I agree this (existing) building is nothing grand, it does fit contextually into the streetscape. We have very little commercial heritage in this City, particularly of the continuous, full-block variety.
We tend to imagine preserving a facade for 3 units is sufficient, where I would argue it's borderline useless. It works so much better with appropriate context.
Our showiest row might be Front, opposite Berczy, and it's interrrupted by the SLC which is a giant carbunkle.
The HP design will improve this quite a bit, but I'd rather ditch the whole thing and have the original heritage rebuilt.
The facility that is the SLC can go anywhere.
In the same vein so can this Partisans design, it's lovely, stick it on Wellesley at Church, LOL.
I'm not really opposed to it here, per se, but I just lament that we can't keep the majority of one block as in tact heritage.