Toronto 96 Spadina | 69.5m | 16s | Allied | Sweeny &Co

ChesterCopperpot

ChesterCopperpot

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Community meeting next Tuesday night - per Joe Cressy's newsletter

This is a pre-application meeting to discuss a proposal for commercial intensification of the properties on the south side of Adelaide Street immediately west of Spadina Avenue.
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Allied own 391 Adelaide

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Interesting. They can't tear that down fast enough for my liking!

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Went to the public consultation this evening. Proposed building is 16 storeys of office, 76.5 m to top of mechanical. Architect is Sweeny and the design retains the two heritage buildings at 96 Spadina and 379 Adelaide in their entirety. In the alley between them, Sweeny is proposing a mast structure from which the main volume will hang above the heritage buildings. The upper volume above is very typical Sweeny, a mostly unadorned glass volume, though hopefully with the hangers displayed prominently on either side of the mast. At street level, west of the heritage buildings, they are proposing a volume with massing that reflects the heritage buildings, possibly with a brick facade (or something similarly textured -- hard to tell from the renders), and retail at street level. They want to retain the permeability between Adelaide and the courtyard through various lanes and through the office lobby.

Plans are clearly still preliminary, but here are my crappy cell phone pics:
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I love it. It's such an elegant solution to keeping Heritage structures, without facedectomizing them (is that a word? You know what I mean).
 
Yeah, that looks great. A contemporary build that respects the past and floats elegantly over a couple of sturdy older structures.

Build it.
 
Update:
Allied Properties REIT is looking to bring new office space to a trio of properties they own at the southwest corner of Spadina and Adelaide in Toronto's Fashion District. Two of the properties—converted heritage commercial/industrial buildings at 96 Spadina Avenue and 379 Adelaide Street West—are currently leased as offices, but the developer does not want to disturb those buildings while densifying. To the west, 391 Adelaide Street West is a part one-storey, part two-storey commercial building, built in the 1940s and not designated heritage. Here is where the company sees a chance to go up… but where it doesn't want to go too high.
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That's exactly what we told them at the end of the presentation: beef it up! (by moving the structure outside the glass envelope).

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interchange42 said:
That's exactly what we told them at the end of the presentation: beef it up! (by moving the structure outside the glass envelope).
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These days, you will very rarely see that, and for good reason. The structure generally needs to be on the warm side of the envelope. It would be feasible to have a design feature/motif that mimics the structure on the exterior, but it's not really feasible to move the structure to the outside of the building.

It is an example of how the appearance of building changes with time, technology, etc. Energy performance targets and interest in minimizing thermal bridging means that the modernist ideal of exposing structure - most notably on the exterior of a building - is now called into question.
 
I cannot help wishing, nevertheless, that they find ways to express it more on the exterior than at 480 University, for example, where the new structure is evident to a degree, but maybe is not as obvious as an engineering feat that out-of-the-ordinary deserves to be.

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