Article by Alex Bozikovic in the Saturday, July 9, 2022 Globe & Mail on the Allies and Morrison master plan and overall redevelopment of the 2150 Lake Shore Boulevard West site. (It may be behind a paywall for non-subscribers).
Designs for the project are all about the small stuff and suggests that if you focus on how a place will feel at ground level – and execute the design with dogged persistence – the rest will take care of itself
www.theglobeandmail.com
Excellent article by
@AlexBozikovic.
Equally important the very good news that Allies and Morrison have been retained as design architects for the phase of actual buildings to go up here.
It will take years, if not decades of commitment to make this community unfold as it should, but it's off to a very good start.
When reading the words of Alfredo Caraballo, the responsible partner at Allies for this project I get the same feeling I do from Claude Cormier. It's not merely ambition; nor simple competence........it's a sense of
caring, of passion for the work, of sweating the details, and wanting to be genuinely proud of the finished product.
Regrettably, I'm not convinced that's something you can teach. There are lots of firms that could use a brush-up on their skills/knowledge, and that always helps; but that drive to reflect on every choice and how each choice interacts w/the next; that inner desire to do great things is something some people have and others often lack.
I'll encourage others to read Alex's entire piece, but I do want to share some words from Mr. Carabello:
"that the visual experience of a place is crucial, and that irregular things are beautiful."
“The block is not just a diagram you impose on the site,” he says. “The shape of the city is shaped by the experience of a person moving through it.”
The above 2 quotes I think exemplify the design philosophy discussed in respect of this community. It's one with a ringing endorsement from me!
He goes on to note that they don't want the community to be an architectural monolith (my word); that they want to avoid endless sameness......... to that end:
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Alex ends on an interesting note............that one might call hopeful.........
I might tweak at this just as bit and say this instead......." The Urban Planning handbook should be treated as what it is; a theoretical guide on how to avoid the worst disasters, not an instruction manual on how to achieve greatness."
I don't know that you can rewrite many of the guidelines to somehow read as though breaking them is sometimes good/necessary, though perhaps they can be made a bit more flexible in spots, and address some elements that have been consistently delivered poorly.
What I would take from this example more than the need to modify guidelines is the need for developers to hire ambitious, caring designers, planners and architects, and provide them flexibility and resources so that they can come up with a compelling vision that can bend Toronto Planning and its guidelines as needed, because everyone is buying in to the idea at play.
Guidelines are meant to limit the damage a Kirkor or T-F might create without rules; not limit what an Allies and Morrison can accomplish within them.