Why should balconies not be part of what differentiates each building?
What would make things interesting for you Tulse? Explaining what you don't consider to be good design does little to help anyone understand what you do consider to be good.
It's not at all that I think playing with balcony articulation is "bad design", just that it has (at least in Toronto) become cliched. One Bloor appears to use the design trope very well (even though it is essentially borrowing the idea from Chicago's Aqua). Market Square's approach also adds interest and plays well with the overall form of the project, in my opinion. But my impression is that various projects have glommed on to this particular trope, and my suspicion is that that's because it is a relatively cheap and lazy way to add visual interest to an otherwise conventional box.
So, to be clear, I'm not against this approach in theory, but I find that it is
being way too overused in the
recent spate of
Toronto projects, which makes them (to my eye) look like lazy copycats of much better realizations of the approach.
More generally, I find that adding a bit of decoration to a conventional box is not all that interesting architecturally. That's why I pointed to Absolute World as an example of innovative, exciting, literally-out-of-the-box architecture that plays with the actual form of the structure. I think we're seeing that in some other projects in the city as well, but these kind of design innovations are presumably fairly expensive, more so than tacking wavy balconies onto a standard rectangle.
And, to be clear, when done well and thoughtfully, the conventional box tower can be inspiring -- certainly TD Centre is, as is its spiritual offspring of X Condos. These are beautiful buildings that respect their form, that revel in it. What I bemoan is the use of a relatively cheap technique to attempt to provide distinction to what are otherwise uninspired forms.
