Also re BA: rather than gesticulating on the blue-spandrelled Bay/Adelaide building that's going, consider the 347 Bay 1920s office building that's "staying"--but in a similar demolish/reconstruction deal that was/is slated for the Concourse. Yet that hasn't generated the same furor. I mean, it's a decent design and all, a standard 20s Chapman & Oxley spec office building; but unlike the Concourse, it doesn't have the electrifying-cultural-symbolism factor of the Group of Seven. Therefore, that's easier to "live with", relatively speaking.
Ultimately, we can learn from history. Take a comparable case from 1970 nearby: the demolition of the Foresters Building on behalf of 390 Bay and the Thomson complex. And there's a fair case to be made that, *relative to our time*, the proposed gutting/WZMHing of the Concourse is equivalent to the Foresters' demolition relative to *its* time.
And what did Foresters fall for? Class A office space, 1970 style. From the office workers' perspective, up-to-date and a clear improvement on its overloaded-old-crock predecessor.
I'm playing a strategic devil's advocate here, but, and especially if we were to transpose your type of arguments back then, that may, according to some revisionist perspective, be argued as a *good* thing, rather than a bad thing.
And had Foresters survived to this day, you can be sure that some "Class A" advocates would view it as an obsolete anachronism that could use a little gutting/replacement--even today.
And let's look at what replaced it. As a pair of sawed-off Rockefeller Center West towers + bank pavilion on a plaza, constructed right when such stuff was falling into fashionable urban disfavour, and compounded by memories of what it replaced, the Thomson complex has always gotten an urban bad rap. Yet...*is* it so bad? There's a kind of 1970-glam and dignity here; in a way, we (and especially those of us who never knew Foresters) are "used to it". It's a fait accompli that we, basically, take for granted; too benign to be truly loathesome. Maybe now that it's half the age that Foresters was when it came down, it deserves reassessment--except to those who absolutely abhor Modernism, it certainly doesn't seem as "anti-urban" as the agitprop of yore presented it.
For the same reason, while I'm prone to pointing out the standard-spec-WZMH quality of the proposed Concourse replacement, I'm loathe toward *over*-judging it; perhaps because it's not that bad an urban-highrise vernacular, generally speaking (though I'd rather it be freestanding, a la Transamerica in N York, rather than with a historic facade attached a la Concourse or Maritime Life).
But then, we think back then, And there's still a "never again" message we must heed. Right?
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it--even if we never can tell what monkey business posterity will be up to...
I don't know, AP--how do you feel about the 35-year-ago replacement of Foresters by the Thomson complex? Good thing, or bad thing?
And if you plead ignorance/don't remember/don't care/who cares/I'm-only-three-and-a-half-years-old re Foresters, basically, you've peevishly shot your credibility re the Concourse and heritage issues in general all to heck...