Toronto Therme Spa/West Island at Ontario Place | 45.15m | 9s | Therme Group | Diamond Schmitt

innsertnamehere said:
note that all underground parking garages in Toronto are now required to be "bathtubbed" regardless of location in the city. Normally this is only required in areas of extremely high water tables (i.e., waterfront fill land), but the city has not been building stormwater infrastructure to handle the pumping from all these new underground garages throughout the city, so now requires it everywhere to "fix" the issue.

In other words, this parking garage will likely cost just as much as an underground garage basically anywhere else, which is still expensive.
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For sure, though I think the difference here is scale. For instance, our standard operating protocol in today's cost environment is that the premium associated with bathtubbing a typical 750sm tower-and-podium site is about $3M over no tub (on sites with otherwise clean geo/hydro-g contexts), so scaling up even just that sort of premium to a 1,000-spot garage that's sitting on fill is immense.
 
ADRM said:
For sure, though I think the difference here is scale. For instance, our standard operating protocol in today's cost environment is that the premium associated with bathtubbing a typical 750sm tower-and-podium site is about $3M over no tub (on sites with otherwise clean geo/hydro-g contexts), so scaling up even just that sort of premium to a 1,000-spot garage that's sitting on fill is immense.
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I imagine there are efficiencies of scale for this sort of thing - a 1,000 space garage with a large floor area (which is likely here) would be far cheaper per space than a 100 space garage on a small site typical for most condo builds.

Again, it's not going to be cheap, and an above-grade garage could likely be delivered for 1/3 the price, but the waterfront location isn't going to make it more expensive at this point as bathtubbing is required everywhere.

The parking demands associated with the development here will also be quite significant, it won't be practical to go without a significant amount of parking.

You could argue that it should be Therme footing the bill, but ultimately a garage in this location is going to serve far more than just the waterpark, servicing the wider waterfront, CNE, etc. I'm fine with it as long as Therme's lease is appropriately accounting for the fact that they aren't required to be providing their own parking (i.e. the province is getting more than if they required Therme to provide their own parking).
 
Question for discussion: do you think the Therme development would be easier to swallow if you knew that the Island Airport was going to be closed once the lease is up in 2034 and turned into a big park with bridge access?

I'd be okay with the spa if I knew there was a bigger, more central piece of waterfront real estate being opened up that would unlock/create potentially one of the the greatest urban parks on the continent. A holistic, big picture vision for the waterfront + islands could go a long way to easing people's anxiety about this particular development.

(And before you jump to defend Billy Bishop, remember that we're going to be building more trains to Pearson soon enough and air travel is bad for the planet anyway).
 
milkycontent said:
Question for discussion: do you think the Therme development would be easier to swallow if you knew that the Island Airport was going to be closed once the lease is up in 2034 and turned into a big park with bridge access?

I'd be okay with the spa if I knew there was a bigger, more central piece of waterfront real estate being opened up that would unlock/create potentially one of the the greatest urban parks on the continent. A holistic, big picture vision for the waterfront + islands could go a long way to easing people's anxiety about this particular development.

(And before you jump to defend Billy Bishop, remember that we're going to be building more trains to Pearson soon enough and air travel is bad for the planet anyway).
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I get it… but where you want to draw a this-for-that trade off? No government could promise it would ever happen. There are too many players, and the two situations are too many years apart… so even dangling this as a possible trade-off is too concrete for what is nothing more than a bit of mist that's about to dissipate into thin air.

42
 
waterloowarrior said:
Ms. Surma said her ministry is preparing a business case to be completed in the spring on potentially moving the Ontario Science Centre there.
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Well I guess this would solve the problem of Flemingdon Park station being closer to the Ontario Science Centre than Science Centre station is. Although I could imagine Metrolinx forgetting/refusing to rename the station after it moves 😅
 
Application in the AIC is now public:

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Development Applications

City Planning COA Application Information Center
app.toronto.ca

A good deal of the substance and renders will have been leaked in last week's news piece. But I will muddle through and see if I can find more original material for the dissection of UT members/readers.

Please note, I may need to edit this post and/or add additional posts as there a whopping 8 Arch. files alone and 8 pages worth of document files!

We'll begin at the beginning, with the Cover Letter (or excerpts thereof)

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Now onto to the Planning Rationale Report:

There's actually something notable right off the top:

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Comment: So while the proposal here has gone public, presumably the one deemed most sell-able, the EA is in fact reviewing multiple other concepts under consideration, none of which, presumably has been made public.

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One more for now, and I'm not even done the first Planning Report File!

This one intrigues me. Its now clear that they are really advancing the idea of wholesale relocation of the Ontario Science Centre to OP. This is something I can actually get behind and would love to see the part of the file advanced while the Therme proposal can be banished to the Recycle bin.

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More after some further sleep and then a coffee!
 
Ok....I'm awake'ish, again. Looks like most of you still haven't rolled out of bed.......LOL

But let's continue:

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Private space in pink, public-access (free) in green:

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We'll finish for this post here, the next and last, for now, I think will just the new renders we have yet to see.
 
There's a beach right there, with more people in swimwear?


Glass aside, this all feels rather uncreative and sterile to me. Feel free to change my mind anyone. Feels like an opportunity lost.
 
ChesterCopperpot said:
3 of which are dealing with a renovation of the Amphitheatre
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I hadn't even gotten to the Arch. Files yet.

By the time I dug through two Planning files and the Renders, I thought I'd be sufficiently comprehensive for one morning, LOL If no one else gets to them, I'll get through them later today, and post in appropriate OP thread.
 
Of that - looks very preliminary (might be worth splitting off this discussion)

Increase capacity of the venue to 20,000 and making it a year-round facility too by enclosing it.

@interchange42's EDIT: this has been spilt off to a Concert Venue/East Island thread.
 
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i'm not a fan of this for the obvious popular reasons but aside from that, i don't like all the concrete walkways, it seems barren to me. I get there's a lot of foliage on the sides but all the renders show some pretty low ground cover and shrubs. I'd like to see more of a forest vibe with tree canopy. i always loved entering Scandinave Spa up in Blue Mountain as it has a great vibe being in a forest. It's also been 10 years now but i still always think about the tree canopy in Singapore when I was there. I absolutely LOVED it.
 
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