Toronto Chelsea Green (was 33 Gerrard) | 297.25m | 90s | Great Eagle | a—A

greenleaf said:
All those grass patches should be there, except the should be raised and be surrounded by seating. That is some ice cold bad design at ground level to me, a design that only wants people to quickly pass through. There’s no design intention to get people to linger, to pop into a shop on this little side street, grab a quick bite to eat, or sit and read with a coffee. Nothing to delight. Nothing warm. Nothing that feels human.

There is opportunity here but it is being squandered.
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Yeah it's honestly pretty disappointing that they'd squander an opportunity like this. Even with basic thoughtfulness about how people would want to exist in the space this could be a really incredible little square, even if the towers around it aren't very good. But they're not even clearing that basic thoughtfulness bar. I hope an improvement of the public realm is negotiated in some way.

The relative heights of the towers feel in uncomfortable proportion to each other to me. Feels like the smaller two should be bigger or the bigger one should be smaller. Fingers crossed the tall one might end up being striking in its simplicity and slenderness. I also don't love the dynamic between it and Aura. I kinda wish it was shorter than Aura so Aura's roofline leads up to the sky as the peak. Oh well! Still pretty cool to see this height peak build around Aura. I'm very very interested to see how YSL will look in this context too.
 
Why can't they keep the punctured window look! It made the building look different in that area. Now it looks like the rest of the buildings with balconies. Like I said every time the development goes to council the buildings end up looking cheaper.
 
Looks like 275.75, 163.5 and 110.15 metres...

Toronto Model 12-12-18 33 Gerrard.png


More renders here
 
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cd concept said:
Like I said every time the development goes to council the buildings end up looking cheaper.
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Yeah cheaper because developers painfully wait for approvals for years while the original concepts become much more expensive to build
..., it's been almost 5 years since this development was first mentioned,
 
Automation Gallery said:
Yeah cheaper because developers painfully wait for approvals for years while the original concepts become much more expensive to build
..., it's been almost 5 years since this development was first mentioned,
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You do realize that everything we saw for this development previously was a concept design and was nowhere near buildable even if it had been approved? Building take time to get from schematic design to construction drawings...

Also, city planners may hold projects up but never as much as developers do. Nobody waffles and changes their mind more often than developers.
 
I don't really understand the financial aspect of this proposal.

For the number of units these new structures have, you would think a refurbishment + partial conversion (see King Eddy) would do it. YSL across the street plans on selling mostly bachelors for student rentals; Chelsea hotel rooms aren't much smaller than those and would be a bit bigger if 2 hotel rooms were combined to make 1 bed condos (~500 sqft).

How is a full demolition + rebuild the most profitable option?
 
floor to floor heights are too small and my understanding is that the hotel has a lot of code issues (not enough staircases, etc.) that would make bringing it up to modern code extremely expensive.

Essentially the building was built so specifically for the 1970's hotel era that it is prohibitively expensive to convert it to a more modern use.

From what I've heard, the building is already currently sitting half abandoned. I believe the south wing is currently unoccupied.
 
.dwg said:
You do realize that everything we saw for this development previously was a concept design and was nowhere near buildable even if it had been approved? Building take time to get from schematic design to construction drawings...
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Then why build the people's expectations up high if they're not going to develope it that way. At least The Hub had the decency to create the same Style development but only shortening it .
 
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You did not understand my post. It was "nowhere near buildable" because it needed time to be taken from schematic design and developed into a constructable building via a fully developed/resolved design and a set of construction documents. These things do not happen over night, and an earlier iteration of a design is not a lie so much as an iteration.

The design you are seeing for The Hub is also most certainly a schematic design (or is still in the Design Development phase) and is therefore also not a real building and also privy to many changes before it sees construction.

Repeat after me: "Renderings are not a building. Rezoning drawings are not a building. SPA drawings are not a building. Only a building is a building." Until something is at the stage of having construction drawings, it is likely to go through many more changes, and a building design is not finalized until it's finished construction.
 
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I don't think the last rendering looked complicated and irritable, but creative. It could have been refined using the same idea. The paneling that creates the windows to be large or small could be made out of light metallic materials something like the Trump Tower. Not the standard heavy concrete slab idea. By the way this building has the same Bland characteristics as the sugar Wharf towers by the lake .
 
Wow! This will compete with the Bay Adelaide Centre for the title of blandest corporate public space in the city. It basically looks like what you'd find in the central business district of any mid- to large-sized city in North America. In fact I recently walked through a similar public space on a particularly depressing trip to Oklahoma City a few months ago: vast empty stretches dotted with small plots of empty grass, encircled by the sterile, sheet glass walls of high-rise buildings. Except this development is not being proposed for an already bland central business district. It's going right by Yonge and Elm, two streets characterized by vibrant, densely textured, human-scale buildings.
 
What is this? This is even more horrible that AURA by ten times.
We need tall buildings not bland ugly eyesores that will remain for 100+ years before torn down.

I really think the city needs design aesthetics review panel for tall visible buildings.
 
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