Toronto King Portland Centre and Kingly Condos | 57.6m | 15s | Allied | Hariri Pontarini

Queen is buried for most of downtown. Front is too. King, for whatever reason, isn't. There's underground infrastructure in place too.
Burying our hydro in most of downtown is the single biggest improvement Toronto can make to its public realm, second only road and sidewalk repairs. I live in Boston most of the year and hydro is buried in virtually all of downtown. You don't notice it when you're here, but when you get back to a city like Toronto it jumps out at you immediately. It looks like absolute hell.
 
Pics taken Mar 22, 2018


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Burying our hydro in most of downtown is the single biggest improvement Toronto can make to its public realm, second only road and sidewalk repairs. I live in Boston most of the year and hydro is buried in virtually all of downtown. You don't notice it when you're here, but when you get back to a city like Toronto it jumps out at you immediately. It looks like absolute hell.

It's just one step. There are streets with buried hydro in Toronto that look just as bad as those that still have overhead wiring. All they did was chop of the tops of the wooden poles. That was the biggest problem in Toronto. We'd do one step and not continue with the next step. That is changing fast and I'm hopeful we will see some surprises on this specific subject over the next 5 years around downtown.

We also have to consider our forefathers made the absolute worst decision when it came to building the first electrical system. Other cities did choose to go underground or hid the overheard lines in lanes or off main streets. I'm not suggesting there weren't other cities with as monumental a challenge as Toronto and didn't shy away from it.

Sidewalks shouldn't have asphalt patches. The funny thing is I also find Toronto a little obsessed with replacing every superficial crack or chip, of course, in select communities.
 
Flyby:

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Phone shots from this evening:
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Just thought id add some info from what i know working on site. The brick is real, it is precast made in a factory somewhere but they are real bricks, the lower grey arches are being covered with real brick after. It will look a lot like the rendering. Cool building, the floors on the commercial side are 2ft above the slab. There is a concrete 2x2 panel that sits on stilts as the floor and everything runs below, meaning it can be changed very easily (electrical etc). One of the nicer buildings i have worked on. The curved glass panels are about $7000-$8000 each just to buy.
 

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