One Bloor: Stellar, but is it special enough?
The Bloor and Yonge location demands a big architectural statement. One Bloor raises the bar, but the details have to be right
Article Comments
John Bentley Mays
Toronto — From Friday's Globe and Mail
Published on Wednesday, Apr. 07, 2010 7:33PM EDT
Last updated on Wednesday, Apr. 07, 2010 7:37PM EDT
The art of skyscraper design came of age and matured in the first half of the 20th century, roughly the period between Louis Sullivan’s Gilded Age masterpieces in Chicago, St. Louis and Buffalo, and the completion, in 1958, of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York. Except on the computer screens and in the imaginations of some contemporary architectural dreamers, it has languished ever since.
The reasons for this fall-off in design creativity are not hard to figure out.
Tall buildings have become very expensive propositions. If investors are to receive substantial profit from a tower venture these days, every aspect of the building’s realization, from engineering and construction to outfitting and marketing, must be streamlined and rationalized as much as possible. Mass-market popularity, not artistic ingenuity, therefore becomes the most urgent assignment of architects who work for mainline developers. These business folk reason that nobody will pay for top-flight design, so why bother? The results of this dismal realpolitik are familiar to all Torontonians: soulless condominium stacks heaped up on streets across the city in the last 20 years, so many mediocre boxes and cylinders devoid of flair or delight or thoughtful urbanism.
But a city gets the architecture it deserves. Gradually over the past few decades, though with gathering speed since around 2000, Toronto has acquired a sizable population of affluent homebuyers who know the difference between a well-designed tall building and a poor one, and who are prepared to put down money for the privilege of living in a tower with style, sophistication and excellent location. Some suppliers of Toronto housing have responded eagerly to this new, smart market – no surprise there – and a few local architectural offices have shown that they are up to the job of creating attractive dwellings for it.
Among these offices, Hariri Pontarini Architects is a relative newcomer to making tall buildings: The firm has been best known, until now, for its distinguished single-family luxury homes and handsomely crafted institutional projects. With the recent unveiling of its inventive tower scheme for the southeast corner of Bloor and Yonge streets, however, Hariri Pontarini has joined the select league of advanced Toronto designers who are now defining the city’s 21st-century skyline.
Called One Bloor by its developer, Great Gulf Group of Companies, this building is slated to soar 65 storeys over the historic intersection in the heart of Toronto. Nearly 700 suites are for sale, ranging in area from 530 square feet to 1,727 square feet, and in price from $390,000 to $1.5-million and up. The interior appointments will be done by the Toronto-based office of Cecconi Simone, and landscaping will be in the hands of Janet Rosenberg + Associates. The designer of the tower is David Pontarini, founding partner and principal in Hariri Pontarini.
Mr. Pontarini’s plan calls for a tall shaft rising from a six-storey podium containing two levels of retail outlets at the bottom. While Toronto has seen many tower-podium arrangements, we have never had a tall building with One Bloor’s kind of strong architectural romanticism.
The basic form of the building is a steel-framed box – no fancy structural shimmies or wiggles here. The facades, however, sweep toward the sky in broad, flat curves sculpted from undulating balconies and expanses of sheer glass. If renderings are anything to go on, this treatment of One Bloor’s tower surfaces should produce a moment of high and urbane visual drama in its otherwise dowdy neighbourhood and raise the artistic bar for the future high-rise development of mid-town.
That said, I do have one hesitation about the project. It’s about what happens at the base.
An earlier proposal for the site, done for another developer by another architect, featured four levels of retail above ground (including a large cinema complex), as opposed to Mr. Pontarini’s two (with no theatres). Four sounds right to me; two seems skimpy – though I suppose it could be argued that one- or two-storey shopping is what’s ordinary along the nearby Bloor Street corridor. But the intersection of Bloor and Yonge is not ordinary. Whatever is built there should be extraordinary in every sense, at grade as well as in elevation – a magnet for tourists and citizens alike, an unusual place full of urban excitement. Mr. Pontarini’s podium could be put anywhere in the downtown core. It’s just not special enough.
But this flaw isn’t large enough to detract from what’s genuinely interesting and promising about David Pontarini’s One Bloor: its recovery of architecture’s admirable early 20th-century ambition to make skyscrapers, not only efficient, but beautiful and inspiring as well. That’s good news for Toronto, as our architects and developers continue to reach for the sky.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real...llar-but-is-it-special-enough/article1526859/