But Hipster, two of the three buildings you talked about as having spires don't have them.
Again with the metonymy. Both St. Lawrence hall and spire have tall pointy bits to them that were allowed to freely soar above the surrounding buildings.
You get misty-eyed about the seventeenth century when London's redevelopment was dominated by one local architect, then you get upset about the twenty first century when Toronto's redevelopment is ... dominated by one local architect!
I never said that I approved of Sir Christopher Wren stamping his mark across the city, but if I must defend his work right here right now, I will say that at least a variety of Wren buildings took hold on the city in all shapes and sizes from the sprawling campus at Greenwich to the towering dome of St. Paul's to smaller churches in the City. aA designs box after box after box and now they all seem to be 40-50 stories regardless of the site!
Toronto has a wealth of Modernist apartment buildings and single family homes from the 1950's to the 1970's. aA's buildings, along with those of other leading contemporary architects working in a style that is an evolution of that Modernism, contribute to exactly the sort of "unified language of style" you appear to want yet decry when you see it.
As I said, the modernist apartment buildings - although thoughtful in design - ruined a large part of the urban fabric by being so auto-centric. For example, the gaybourhood has a plethora of very finely appointed modernist buildings but they are all set well back from the street by oversize front lawns and car laneways. This wrecks the urban appeal of so many of them. For this reason, Kensington market is a joy even though it is a bunch of wooden shanties stapled together in a haphazard afterthought, while the proud parade of modernist apartment towers along Avenue road north of St. Clair is an urban dead zone.
In the late 1990s, there was a "back to urbanism" movement in Toronto's modernist condo boom that I greatly welcomed. Like I said, I really welcomed Clewes' first buildings like MoZo that met the street and felt comfortable among its turn-of-the-century neighbours, but were unabashedly modern. The latest bumper crop of aA buildings don't do that. In some cases they are arrogant to their surroundings, such as the unforgiving granite base of the Four Seasons condotel, or the completely out-of-scale dilemma at Pure Spirit. The failure to reconcile with its surrounding neighbours is what makes the latest generation of many aA buildings a failure in contributing to that unified language of style I talk about.
--
I am basically echoing everything I said in my second post. I don't want this to spiral into the son of the Pure Spirit condo debate, so this is the last from me on this project.
