Well, duh

The 2007 edition of the Pug Awards came in last night at the Gladstone -- a building Bad Buildings endorses wholly as a good building, for myriad reasons, all solid -- and no big surprise as to the big loser (winner?) in the worst-building-of-the-year derby: BE Bloor condos, at Bloor and Landsdowne (thanks to Torontoist for the pic). Now, it's not just that it's ugly, people, which it is, but the oppressive scale at which it was built is a chilling throwback to the era of Modernist slab structures, which were scattered willy-nilly all over North America with the the wonderfully naive notion that they would make city living more democratic and efficient. Same notion, natch, that suggested building a suspended freeway all along our lakefront would be a good idea, too.

Uh, okay. We all know how that worked out -- here and elsewhere, they became upright slums, and warehousing for the poor (sort of like what those green glass towers poking up all over town will be some day, but we digress). Back to BE -- scary evocations aside, BE is a study in slapdash, chock-a-block drafting and insensitivity to scale. It's a hulking slab that's as much a wall as a building, discouraging anything like interaction from the outside. Kind of like a prison. Which is likely what it would feel like to live there. Big question is, what lies did the developers tell buyers pre-construction, to get this horror financed?


Elsewhere in the Pugs, KPMB's Federal Courts building got the nod from online voters as one of the best, as well as from the Star's Chris Hume. Hume we love, but goddamn, Chris, are you serious? This is part of a larger problem -- the godlike anointment of Bruce Kuwabara as the patron saint of Canadian architecture (though his partner, Tom Payne, is the culprit here). Brucie talks a good game, but at his heart, he's a moneyman, too. If this building doesn't indicate that, then check out Montage over at Cityplace -- at best, a generic condo tower, and at worst, a half-assed effort that ignores the tremendous pressure it and its ilk put on the downtown core in every sense.

Sorry to say it, pal, but this disjointed assemblage of unlike forms is no less half-assed than the condos you boys are churning out these days. It looks to us suspiciously like a design from 1987 that was never built, kept on a shelf for a rainy day, and quickly repurposed for a government client with no imperative to sell stuff. Nice building, Chris? We don' think so, but there's no accounting for taste.

What you can't deny, though, is the brutality of its encroachment into the urban texture. Maybe the KPMB boys had it all drawn up for the last Calgary oil boom in the early 90s, to be tucked into the other shiny glass swoops springing up in the there and then. But when the boom went bust, it went back in the drawer until another sucker -- the Federal government -- came along.

One things for sure: It couldn't have been designed for here. It is the only thing even near its height for blocks. It waves its ass in the face of its next-door neighbour, the Rex Hotel, way, way down there at two stories. And it stares down at the poor little Campbell House Museum, the oldest surviving brick house from the original Town of Yorke -- one of our few icons, alas -- with indifferent arrogance. Kind of like your firm, Bruce. If everyone keeps telling you how great you are, you must be, right? Yeah. Right.

More later.