Toronto Cinema Tower | 142.64m | 43s | Daniels | Kirkor Architects

from today
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Looks almost Southwestern, or Adobe-inspired.
Material-wise I don't think it works here and it also has no relationship with the tower above.
 
Daniels and Kirkor really dropped the ball on podium materials. They should have used Corten steel. It would have looked
100x better and could have been cheaper that whatever crap they used here.

Edit: just realized AoD said the same thing a few posts up. Great minds think alike!
 
metroTO said:
Looks almost Southwestern, or Adobe-inspired.
Material-wise I don't think it works here and it also has no relationship with the tower above.
Click to expand...

This is essentially one of the reasons I don't often like towers on a podium. Often the podium tries to either fit in with the surrounding context, or do something "unique", but we're left with a standard glass condo that looks picked from a catalogue. The themes and motifs are rarely carried up the tower, and it ends up looked jarring or contrived.

There are exceptions of course, but it's a plague that seems to affect far too many buildings; I wish we'd do either do away with podium in their current form, or have architects actually design a cohesive building from ground to top.
 
I couldn't disagree more.

I like the idea of a contextual podium with varying facades to add interest to the street. To me, the tower is a completely separate identity that sits above, that one must look up to notice or see. (Unless they're looking at the skyline).
 
egotrippin said:
This is essentially one of the reasons I don't often like towers on a podium. Often the podium tries to either fit in with the surrounding context, or do something "unique", but we're left with a standard glass condo that looks picked from a catalogue. The themes and motifs are rarely carried up the tower, and it ends up looked jarring or contrived.

There are exceptions of course, but it's a plague that seems to affect far too many buildings; I wish we'd do either do away with podium in their current form, or have architects actually design a cohesive building from ground to top.
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more. The obsession with podiums of late has always bothered me for these reasons. I find the scrawny-tree-sprouting-from-a-planter look to be extremely ugly and almost suburban. It's like apologetic urbanism; we're making a tower, but we don't want to offend the height-averse, so we'll make a stick tower pop out of a bucket podium. Why do so many of our buildings need to look so diffident? It destroys any sense of grandeur and cultural pride that I get from buildings in Manhattan, for instance. This tapering-at-the-podium technique is another symptom of Toronto's insecurity.

Also, as you say, the attempt to fit into the context with the podium always seems to have a terrible effect on the architecture, as the tower becomes painfully generic and completely aesthetically divorced from the podium below. Another thing that bothers me is the waste of (air) space. I wish these buildings could use all the space above the property rather than waste so much in setbacks and podiums. Using space efficiently, to me, is so much more important than not seeming “oppressive†to those who are architecturally sensitive.
 
^Well put, the nearly suburban point I agree with a lot. It all seems like a way to please everybody on paper, while falling short in execution. There's no cohesion, and compared to what a lot of other cities are doing, I feel it's becoming a very antiquated design concept.

SP!RE said:
I couldn't disagree more.

I like the idea of a contextual podium with varying facades to add interest to the street. To me, the tower is a completely separate identity that sits above, that one must look up to notice or see. (Unless they're looking at the skyline).
Click to expand...

Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
 
The failure to execute a high quality podium properly or to link the design of the podium and the tower is a different issue from the soundness of the podium concept. Someone who can't design the latter well is just as unlikely to do so for a building that doesn't necessitate a podium.

AoD
 
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