alklay
Senior Member
Debate is absolutely pointless if one cannot tell the difference in scale between a 50 story building and the lowrise Rackhouse.
The curtain wall/glass on Pure Spirit looks so chintzy. Especially in person... it looks very plasticky and cheap. Ugh... SPIRE was far nicer.
The windowless and useless hulk of Rack House 'M' is being replaced by more than a condo - a low, attractive, and useful podium building that will contain the entrance to the apartments, and retail space. Something fugly will die so that something useful and attractive will rise.
Imagine if a developer bought the Parthenon and then surrounded it with 3 30-50 story glass towers. I'm sure a room full of designers and architecture students could debate its aesthetic merits until the cows come home. The impact, however, would be far fewer tourists and, of course, international outcry. Now, the Distillery ain't the Parthenon but the same principle applies: something small and unique is being surrounded by a group of much larger things that are not unique. In such an equation, the small unique thing rarely, benefits.
Attempting to portray the delightful regeneration of the Distillery District as being akin to - nay, worse than - a theoretical demise of the Parthenon is surely one of the more ludicrous scaremongering gambits that we've seen, born of unimaginative2's fevered brow, so far on this thread.