khris
Senior Member
Financially viable? How so? They might not be the best looking towers, but hideous? I wouldn't go that far.
You do know that the three hideous, Pinnacle-esque beasts behind what many seem to think is the whole Absolute complex (the two 'Marilyn' towers) were required to make the 'iconic' (wow, I hate that word) towers financially viable?
The project was always planned as five towers - initially the final two phases were intended to look similar to the first three towers. Hazel McCallion made a concerted effort for the developers to consider doing something 'different' at the Hurontario/Britannia intersection and the city provided a number of incentives to help sway the decision makers at Fernbrook and Cityzen.
With respect to the suggestion that the original three towers were required to make the final two tower financially viable - that really wouldn't be in the game plan for the developers. Each project would have to stand on its own merit to be deemed viable by both the developers and their financial partners – at the time sales started the psf was about $100 beyond the typical MCC prices, but still lagged behind central Toronto. Construction and engineering budgets however also would reflect the nature of the tower and given the unit prices I think some people may be holding onto very high expectation in terms of execution…
I don't think we'll see a lot of other developers follow this model in Mississauga, it is perceived as risky and the location isn't ideal for that type of 'open' competition - reading between the lines you may notice that there were very few 'A' or even 'B' list international architectural firms that participated in the competition - it was mostly a lot of unknowns, which can produce interesting results... but obviously there were reasons why the competition lacked those big names and reasons why this model hasn’t been replicated by other developers in other GTA locations.
While driving by this morning, noticed that they have one of the concrete pump boom "things" at Absolute 1 (west of the core, along Hurontario). So that should make their job easier.
Interesting.
I wonder if it was for tower 2? They were almost at ground level last week.
khristopher, it actually looked like they were working on tower 1 aka Marilyn....