urbandreamer
recession proof
10 June 2012
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Red October
Senior Member
They somehow made it even less big city feel than the old one... This looks like something you'd find in downtown Burlington.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
Well, his son broke this one.
AoD
AoD
SP!RE
°°°°°°
Yuck. Insanely insensitive to the original design.
Sir Novelty Fashion
Senior Member
It needn't be a 70s phenomenon. Remember this?
I wonder whether transparent library walls would be any more desirable than transparent museum walls where it comes to preserving a collection.
Mostly, though, I'm amazed at the way the rendering perspectives for this project completely hoodwinked me in to believing that we'd be looking at an airy four story square atrium, instead of this drab little sugarcube that squares off the most engaging part of the original design.
(I won't miss the colonnades, though. One of Toronto's least-helpful design fixations.)
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
SNF:
In the case of the ROM, they chose to (for budget, conservation and other reasons) to deviate from a more translucent/transparent material - it wasn't a technical impossibility so to say. As to preserving a collection - there are ways to get around that issue (like the positioning of the stacks/spaces, secondary walls, etc. It need not look like Robarts.
AoD
In the case of the ROM, they chose to (for budget, conservation and other reasons) to deviate from a more translucent/transparent material - it wasn't a technical impossibility so to say. As to preserving a collection - there are ways to get around that issue (like the positioning of the stacks/spaces, secondary walls, etc. It need not look like Robarts.
AoD
fiendishlibrarian
Active Member
The short answer is no, libraries avoid this as much as possible as the sun *does* damage some materials, especially older paper stock and archival materials. And re: Robarts, it looks the way it does because it was never meant to be an open facility above the fourth floor, hence the continued presence of the vacuum tubes and dummy elevators that were used to process and transport materials requested from the ground floors up to the stacks. It was also meant to be a graduate student-only facility.
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Towered
Superstar
10 June 2012
That chick's awesome calves definitely steal the show in this pic.
dilman
Banned
it's a guy
jozl
Active Member
Meh, not the calves, the library.
CanadianNational
Senior Member
All it would have taken for this to work was to either eliminate the use of metal banding by employing structural glass, or make the new metal identical in colour to the old. It's surprising that something so relatively simple has been bungled so obviously.
SP!RE
°°°°°°
Yeah the silver metal strips on the new windows are jarring and out of place.
The second floor windows of the original construction - looking like simplified baguette cut diamonds - now look marooned. Reference to those windows in the new additions could have tied the work together, but as completed it looks like we have one building slipped under and around another one entirely. It's pretty unfortunate.
42
42
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
I agree - it's the architectural equivalent to Zhang Huan's recent staging of Semele. There's no real dialogue between the addition and the original.
Mississauga Slim
Active Member
I was just thinking that! Oh no, wait a minute, I wasn't thinking that at all.