Tower Up

Photo by hyfen.
Reprinted by the good graces of our friends at Torontoist.

Ladies and gentlemen, your humble critic is a little verklempt. Quite touched, were we, by the outpouring of support for our endeavour, and the flood of new Facebook friends we’ve open-armedly received since our maiden voyage on Torontoist last week. We have, it seems, touched a nerve; we're grateful to Torontoist for helping us, er, touch it.

But on with the show. All the wishes Bad Buildings received were not sunshine and roses. Oh, no. And that, frankly, is as it should be. Building is not just a physical act, but a political one as well, freighted with layers a'plenty—class, usually, pre-eminent among them.

Bad Buildings does not shy away from this talk, as motivation and use are as much a part of architecture as design. One of our commentors suggested the city—and every city—should do away with the official plan. The official plan, apparently, is why we have housing projects and slums. Okay. That's wrong. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Today, we're going to look more at one of our most common built forms which, sadly and paradoxically, is probably the one in all urbanity that is rarely done right. We're talking about the tower, that high-density albatross that seems to sprout up behind out backs every time we turn around.

This is good: For this city—or any other—anticipating explosive population growth, building up, not out, is key to sustainability, in the most pragmatic sense; it's also crucial to an iteration of urbanity that most of us embrace in our best hearts: A city brimming with pedestrians and street life, a city on intimate terms with itself.

So, towers: We need em. And baby, we’re gettin' 'em, from the dulcet shores of Lake Ontario up to the yuppie-in-waiting playground of Yonge and Eg, and beyond. To repeat: Towers are a good thing. But these towers? Not so much. There are a few simple reasons why. Here’s a primer.

Towers are hard. They are, in essence, stacking shelves—identical floorplates, typically with identical function, piled high on top one another. Architecturally, that’s a toughie. Doesn't leave a whole lot of space, really, for actual design.

Or so most architects think. They try goofy balconies, tacked on to the exterior, or they mix it up a little partway up, so a single building looks like two, piled on top of each other. (Montage, Cityplace, at left, we’re looking at you). They add irrelevant forms, dangling off their towers like Christmas trees (hi there, Pinnacle Centre). They take a crack at different shapes, like the cartoonish ellipse down at Panorama, or pointy spires on top, like at the forthcoming Trump Tower, Toronto edition. In the end, though, it's still a stack—just a stack junked up with all sorts of silliness meant to distract from the fact of that very matter.

It all puts Bad Buildings in the mind of Robert Venturi's still wonderfully relevant book, Learning from Las Vegas (speaking of junked up towers—hoo boy). Among Venturi's arguments—the context of which being that "vernacular" architecture (ie. tacky cheesy) was to be celebrated—was the difference between Modernism and Post-modernism, rendered thusly: A building is either a duck, or a decorated shed. Modernism was the duck—a shop selling duck decoys, shaped like a duck: simple, clear, to the point. The decorated shed pretty much sums up Post-modern architecture: Build it however you want, and gussy it up with whatever this month’s flavour might be.

That's Toronto. Which is sad and strange, really, given our most famous duck, and the lesson it teaches. We’re talking about the TD Centre, Mies's last crack. It's probably not a coincidence that the age of the Moderns coincided with the (first) age of the skyscraper. Back to Venturi: when you're stuck with a stack, you need to go duck. More specifically, necessarily utilitarian, generic forms shouldn’t be tarted up so we can pretend they're something they're not.

Basics, people: Proportion. Material. Form. You know, the stuff of good architecture. Look at the TD Centre. Cool. Elegant. Austere. It takes the inside, and turns it out. You can see the building, in its entirety, and not by coincidence, feel it, too. As a cluster, the four buildings of the TD Centre are a symphony of perfect proportion and spatial relations: Not too tall, not too squat, standing with casual elegance together in a gang of spare refinement.

lumiere.gifThere was a lovely, albeit brief period in this city when the TD Centre needed some cool buddies to hang out with, and the other banks complied. Commerce Court, by I.M. Pei? Hi, pal! First Canadian Place? Hey, buddy—nice cladding, but you gotta tighten it up a tad. Scotia Centre? Well, okay, dude, you can hang too, but what’s up with that crazy cut out and weirdo colour?

Bad Buildings can only wonder what the senior towers in town think as they glance across the skyline at the forest of green glass swoops hanging loose by the water like a bunch of delinquent teenagers, tarted up in cheap clothes, trying to out pimp one another with flash.

It’s no coincidence, maybe, that these affronts are developer projects. Remember the basics? Proportion: Developers don't care much for this. They care for max height and max profit. Material: Most of their towers are glass. Glass is, relatively speaking, cheap. Max profit. Form: See "decorated shed." Whatever baubles sell, baby.

Truth to tell, they don't all stink. Bad Buildings digs Lumiere (but not the name—good God—or the irritating website), at right. With its recessed balconies and extruded concrete structural spine, it's a tight little exercise in perfect proportion and respect for form. Alas, it's an anomaly. And that, friends, does stink.

Bad Buildings hopes we've helped you see right from wrong. More of us need to. Towers are the future, and more power to 'em. But if we don’t demand more than what we've been getting, we're in trouble. When the decorations tumble from the sheds and shatter on our streets, we all lose, don't we?

Tower Up

Photo by hyfen.
Reprinted by the good graces of our friends at Torontoist.

Ladies and gentlemen, your humble critic is a little verklempt. Quite touched, were we, by the outpouring of support for our endeavour, and the flood of new Facebook friends we’ve open-armedly received since our maiden voyage on Torontoist last week. We have, it seems, touched a nerve; we're grateful to Torontoist for helping us, er, touch it.

But on with the show. All the wishes Bad Buildings received were not sunshine and roses. Oh, no. And that, frankly, is as it should be. Building is not just a physical act, but a political one as well, freighted with layers a'plenty—class, usually, pre-eminent among them.

Bad Buildings does not shy away from this talk, as motivation and use are as much a part of architecture as design. One of our commentors suggested the city—and every city—should do away with the official plan. The official plan, apparently, is why we have housing projects and slums. Okay. That's wrong. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Today, we're going to look more at one of our most common built forms which, sadly and paradoxically, is probably the one in all urbanity that is rarely done right. We're talking about the tower, that high-density albatross that seems to sprout up behind out backs every time we turn around.

This is good: For this city—or any other—anticipating explosive population growth, building up, not out, is key to sustainability, in the most pragmatic sense; it's also crucial to an iteration of urbanity that most of us embrace in our best hearts: A city brimming with pedestrians and street life, a city on intimate terms with itself.

So, towers: We need em. And baby, we’re gettin' 'em, from the dulcet shores of Lake Ontario up to the yuppie-in-waiting playground of Yonge and Eg, and beyond. To repeat: Towers are a good thing. But these towers? Not so much. There are a few simple reasons why. Here’s a primer.

Towers are hard. They are, in essence, stacking shelves—identical floorplates, typically with identical function, piled high on top one another. Architecturally, that’s a toughie. Doesn't leave a whole lot of space, really, for actual design.

Or so most architects think. They try goofy balconies, tacked on to the exterior, or they mix it up a little partway up, so a single building looks like two, piled on top of each other. (Montage, Cityplace, at left, we’re looking at you). They add irrelevant forms, dangling off their towers like Christmas trees (hi there, Pinnacle Centre). They take a crack at different shapes, like the cartoonish ellipse down at Panorama, or pointy spires on top, like at the forthcoming Trump Tower, Toronto edition. In the end, though, it's still a stack—just a stack junked up with all sorts of silliness meant to distract from the fact of that very matter.

It all puts Bad Buildings in the mind of Robert Venturi's still wonderfully relevant book, Learning from Las Vegas (speaking of junked up towers—hoo boy). Among Venturi's arguments—the context of which being that "vernacular" architecture (ie. tacky cheesy) was to be celebrated—was the difference between Modernism and Post-modernism, rendered thusly: A building is either a duck, or a decorated shed. Modernism was the duck—a shop selling duck decoys, shaped like a duck: simple, clear, to the point. The decorated shed pretty much sums up Post-modern architecture: Build it however you want, and gussy it up with whatever this month’s flavour might be.

That's Toronto. Which is sad and strange, really, given our most famous duck, and the lesson it teaches. We’re talking about the TD Centre, Mies's last crack. It's probably not a coincidence that the age of the Moderns coincided with the (first) age of the skyscraper. Back to Venturi: when you're stuck with a stack, you need to go duck. More specifically, necessarily utilitarian, generic forms shouldn’t be tarted up so we can pretend they're something they're not.

Basics, people: Proportion. Material. Form. You know, the stuff of good architecture. Look at the TD Centre. Cool. Elegant. Austere. It takes the inside, and turns it out. You can see the building, in its entirety, and not by coincidence, feel it, too. As a cluster, the four buildings of the TD Centre are a symphony of perfect proportion and spatial relations: Not too tall, not too squat, standing with casual elegance together in a gang of spare refinement.

lumiere.gifThere was a lovely, albeit brief period in this city when the TD Centre needed some cool buddies to hang out with, and the other banks complied. Commerce Court, by I.M. Pei? Hi, pal! First Canadian Place? Hey, buddy—nice cladding, but you gotta tighten it up a tad. Scotia Centre? Well, okay, dude, you can hang too, but what’s up with that crazy cut out and weirdo colour?

Bad Buildings can only wonder what the senior towers in town think as they glance across the skyline at the forest of green glass swoops hanging loose by the water like a bunch of delinquent teenagers, tarted up in cheap clothes, trying to out pimp one another with flash.

It’s no coincidence, maybe, that these affronts are developer projects. Remember the basics? Proportion: Developers don't care much for this. They care for max height and max profit. Material: Most of their towers are glass. Glass is, relatively speaking, cheap. Max profit. Form: See "decorated shed." Whatever baubles sell, baby.

Truth to tell, they don't all stink. Bad Buildings digs Lumiere (but not the name—good God—or the irritating website), at right. With its recessed balconies and extruded concrete structural spine, it's a tight little exercise in perfect proportion and respect for form. Alas, it's an anomaly. And that, friends, does stink.

Bad Buildings hopes we've helped you see right from wrong. More of us need to. Towers are the future, and more power to 'em. But if we don’t demand more than what we've been getting, we're in trouble. When the decorations tumble from the sheds and shatter on our streets, we all lose, don't we?

In Living Colour

The aforementioned comic, courtesy Laz and the Toronto Star ... click for full size ...

Aw, shucks

Bad Buildings indulged in our morning coffee (okay, early-afternoon coffee) today, as usual, with the Star splayed in front of us. Spreading stewed strawberry compote (never jam) on a thin slice of organic whole-grain rye (thank you, Dimpflmeier Schinkinbrot!), we happened upon a lovely little comic strip on page 3 of the paper's Ideas section, depicting yours truly, and our efforts in this space, and at our spiritual partners, Torontoist.

It was done by Sarah Lazarovic, our Facebook friend and, quite clearly, a clever firecracker of a writer/drawer of the first order. We are neither Stinson nor student, Laz, and you're quite right, mystery is our M.O. We like to think that anonymity is what gives us objectivity, not in any way hampers it; we owe no-one no-thing, except you, to whom we owe thanks. Go Illini!

Frankly, A-OK

Bad Buildings is drifting rather lazily in the long weekend, as our week of inactivity might indicate (Bad Buildings has actually had a hella week in our real life, which is why Bad Buildings seems a little behind, but we all need a breath now and again, hm?)

In any old case, we're going to wander gently into the pending 3-day idleness that awaits with a reconsideration. Yes, we are human(s), and being so frail, occasionally make mistakes. To wit: For solidly the first year of its life, Bad Buildings had a hate on for the Four Seasons Centre, by Diamond Schmitt, our much-touted shiny-new opera house at the corner of Queen and University. All right, if not an actual hate-on, then a definite ambivalence-on for what, by any logical standard, should have been a glorious, inspiring structure, snagging the last, best site on the city's only real grand boulevard, University.

When they finally finished the old 4SC, with its charcoal brick cladding and glass facade, we felt the city let out a collective sigh of deflation. It was ... totally okay, in that bland, institutional, "you mean we weren't designing a hospital?" sort of way. But it sure as hell wasn't an architectural thrill, like, say, the Disney Centre in L.A., by Frank Gehry -- who, incidentally, ended up on the shit end of a stick that some civic big dogs like Alan Gottleib tried to use to stir the initial design competition for the 4SC in the FG's favour. Frankie backed out when other competitors cried foul; in short, his integrity seemed to have saddled us with another mediocre building in an expansive field of mediocrity.

But Bad Buildings went to the ballet the other night (not a usual occurrence, we can assure you; we prefer the Horseshoe, or on any given night), and experienced, if not a conversion, exactly, then a slight thawing of our cold, cold heart as to the 4SC. Not spectracular, no. Not jaw-dropping, heart-pounding, awe-provoking. None of that. But Bad Buildings warmed to its subtle charms, like the upper floor gathering spaces, contained only by glass, with a quietly commanding view of University Avenue. Or the actual amphitheatre itslef, which manages to be both oddly intimate and acoustically perfect, while offering clear, close views of the performance from almost any seat.

The 4SC is far from perfect; we still don't care for the aquarium style facade (from the outside, anyway), the cold, echo-y main floor lobby still puts one in the mind of a bus station more than a creative enterprise, and we don't care what anyone says -- if Diamond Schmitt thought they were doping something self-consciously capital-M Modern, like the masters, Mies and Corb, they skipped the form/function/material chapters in the guide book. But all in? Not a bad building at all.

Freed falling

Now this is just plain creepy.



Bad Buildings hopes Mr. Brush Cut with the suit and tie is an actor, and a well-paid one at that. But to be honest, Bad Buildings has no time to be creeped out. We're too busy being angry. This building, by the careless clowns at Freed Developments, boasts the usual litany of developer money-grubbing: Out-of-proportion, out of context and, frankly, out of their freakin' minds. 16 stories. At King and Bathurst. Nevermind that the official plan cuts the height restriction off at 8 -- less than half.

As Bad Buidings stresses, these are just the usual offences in a hyper-development climate plagued with an OMB that is all too happy to rubber-stamp most any proposed violation of our city's official plan. What makes 650 King -- or, in its own marketing-ese, six50king -- more revolting is what it so callously displaces.

Sadly, this teeny-tiny picture is the best we can do -- especially now that Freed has encased the lovely brick of the original 650 King's modern, elegant facade in horizontal wood hoarding (Good Lord, people, that is so Wallpaper magazine, circa 1996).

Bad Buildings had the good fortune of actually going in 650 King, a few years back, when it was still a semi-active uniform factory, built in the early 20th century. The clean, concrete slab floors, the band windows, the light pouring into against the warm brick walls set Bad Buildings in the mind of pure, urbane beauty -- a palette against which lives could be rendered so perfectly.

Instead, we're going to tear it down. Tear it down, and replace it with 16 stories of glass that will lord over this stretch of King Street West that, as it stands, is among the most perfectly-scaled streetscapes in the city.

The original 650 was part of that streetscape, a seamless blend of form, proportion and material that enhanced the experience of simply being there. In its place, yet another monstrosity that bears no relation to its surroundings.

Sad, but typical. Pete Freed, you've let us down this time. Which is surprising, really, because some of your other developments have been sensitive compliments to the cityscape they inhabit. We like 550 Wellington; it inhabits its space with restraint, and promises to enliven the neighbourhood with sleek, subtle density. We like 66 Portland; OK, we liked the old light industrial stuff you knocked down to build it better, but your development there defers nicely to the proportional streetscape it squats behind.

And now this. So what happened, Pete? It makes us think you were playing possum, paying some dues and building some political capital so you could turn around and stab us in the back. If you let us down like this, Petey, how can we ever love you again?

Off the Rails

Maybe it's the heat, but Bad Buildings woke up in a nasty mood this weekend. Sweaty and angry -- not the best way to start your Saturday. Like, at all. But how else to react to the slowly-festering news of the city's latest sell-out -- this time, the Roundhouse to (excuse us whilst we barf in our mouths a tad) Leon's?

Bad Buildings' has no beef with discount furniture chains. Hey, people with no taste or style gotta sit somewhere, too. Nor does your humble critic really harbour precious notions of "heritage" buildings and their appropriate usage (we rather like the Roundhouse residence undertaken by the Steamwhistle Brewery, for example; it's a nice nod to both the railway heritage of the building and the city's industrial past -- not to mention a favourite activity undertaken by no small number of railboys back in the day. Ah, booze and heavy machinery -- a timeless pair).

Back to the point: We're particularly not too terribly fussy in the case of the city's old building stock; we're big fans of the Jacobsian notion (as in Jane) that damn near any use of a serviceable building is better than no use at all.

But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, people, Bad Buildings has to use a favourite term again, and it's this: Context. Instead of belabouring the point with more blather, we'd like to employ a more efficient mode of expressing a couple thousand words. Namely, what could this:



And this:



... possibly have in common? Let's see, one is a prized, deeply urban remnant of an industrial identity, when buildings were still assumed to be permanent (can you imagine?); the other is a flimsy icon of mass-suburbanization, necessitated impermanence, and throwaway culture. Hmmm, we can't see why that would be a bad. fit. Neither did city council, apparently, who allowed this crap to happen.

One can safely assume that Leon's, with its bizarre stab at new market segments with their freshly-launched (gag) "urban line," saw an opportunity with the appalling Cityplace cluster of condo badness in various states of completion nearby (though it's safe to say Leon's gear wasn't featured in the whitewashed, ultra-urban-pitch for these awful little patches of skyscape.)

Shame, really, that the city didn't see an opportunity themselves; more than poofy pleather couches and do-not-pay-a-cent fibreboard dining room sets, Bad Buildings notes to self that people, without exception, need to eat. So how about something a little more contextually relevant -- not to mention actually useful and integrated into the needs of a community -- to the good old railhouse -- like, say, a vibrant, St. Lawrence-esque food market, the likes of which the spanking-new insta-'hood sorely lacks?

But no, that would take energy, imagination, and respect for the environs -- something the city, in allowing the construction of Cityplace in the first place, proved it simply does not have. Good luck, Leon's. In the grand mistake by the lake, you'll fit right in. You deserve each other. But the Roundhouse deserves better.

Hey kids! Colour-riffic architecture!

Now this is just plain stupid. As if the CN Tower wasn't an overbearing presence on the skyline already, the geniuses who manage it are going to make it a cartoon version of itself -- a gaudy, candy-coloured eyesore of an overbearing presence. Why, oh why, are we not surprised? Maybe because, in Toronto's try-hard urges for architectural acceptance, it'll do almost anything to get noticed -- actual aesthetic and contextual acumen be damned? (see, Crystal, ROM, for further detail.)

We're not fond of the tower and its try-hard genesis in general. Buildings built with the express purpose of being landmarks rarely become them in any genuine sense; they just meander along with their 'hey, look at me!' sign permanently affixed -- which is so, so sad, really, and which the colour-iffic silliness we see here just serves to highlight.

We don't hate the goofy old tower, per se; it's kind of cute, in the slow-kid-at-school sort of way. As to the nonsense depicted above, though, we think Torontoist said it best, with the new LED lighting system "dramatically transforming a brilliant exercise in modernist subtlety into a cheap, plastic martini spear." They go on to say "(w)e think that whatever happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas." Amen to that, brother. Word.

Break time

Bad Buildings realizes that inherent in the discussion of bad buildings are the posting of images of said bad buildings. While pragmatically useful, this surfeit of aesthetic nastiness is bringing Bad Buildings down (and making for a rather ass-looking blog, alas.) So to leaven things slightly, here are some pretty flowers:

Don't get used to it.

Go forth and multiply ... somewhere else

To be clear: Bad Buildings means not to harp on the private condo developer community exclusively. We might as well haul out a big ol' barrel full o' fish and start firing with our AK-47. The point: Easy target. Too easy, some might say.

But damned if it's not an appropriate one, too. Thanks to the OMB, that Death Star-like, shadowy "oversight" development body that has a habit of greenlighting any and everything the city says 'no' to -- like all the junk planned for the Queen West Triangle, for example, none of which the city's planning department approved, and all of which the OMB over-freakin'-ruled -- private developers are runnign roughshod over the delicate urban ecosystems that make the city something we love: A collection of closely knit communities and neighbourhoods.

Have a look-see at (shudder) Liberty Village, say -- a tower thrown here (that's Liberty Towers, above, utterly out of proportion with its surroundings), 'lofts' over there, a field of numbingly identical, cheap 'rowhouses' -- none of which have more than two bedrooms, and none of which, consequently, are likely to be 'home' to anyone for more than a few years.

Why? The aggressive lifestyle marketing campaign is aimed almost exclusively at young breeders, yet to breed (hence the teensy spaces); when they do breed, in a few years, they gotta move. That means a transient collection of residents holed up in shoddy buildings, cycling through every 3 to 5 years. Sound like a community to you? Hmm. us neither.

"It's a neighbourhood," CanAlfa, the LV developer declares on its homepage front. Yeah. And an AMC Gremlin was a car, technically, too. But we don't want anything to do with that, either.

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.

Blox-heads on College

Oh, daddy. Do we even have to say a word about this one? Do we have to point out that it's Construx-style design bears precisely zero relation to the neighbourhood surrounding it -- which just happens to be one of the city's most vibrant, Little Italy? Do we really need to mention that the damn thing is near twice the height of anything for blocks? And that it dwarfs poor little Grappa, just to the east? Do we need to spell out for you the bruality of dangling rich people's living rooms next to the windows of multi-unit rooming houses? Not to mention waving the lifestyle of said richies -- units start around $900,000 -- in everyone's face by going floor-to-ceiling glass top to bottom, putting their biz right on the damn street?

They call it, in T.O.-developer marketing-ese, N-BLOX. And if project architects Roland Rom Colthoff and Richard Witt, from Quadrangle -- who specialize in retrofits, not new construction, for cripes' sake -- were going for the alien landing craft look, they nailed it, proper. But if they actually meant to do some damn architecture -- you know, that stuff that is sensitive to scale, texture, and the actual character and make-up of a neighbourhood ingrained in a long-standing urban fabric -- well, this is a big fat fuck up, pure and simple.

On the plus side, as far as we know, the building is yet to gain permit approval from council -- though those pricks at the OMB will fix that in a hurry, no doubt. That's the short term. But in the longer term, you really have to look at this self-satisfying arch-school wank-off and ask yourself: Just what the fuck is it about the concept of context that these clowns don't understand?

The little blurby on Quadrangle's site (see link above) says their work "genuinely enhances the urban environment."

Yeah, maybe that was true for these clowns, before property values went wild and it made more sense to do a spiffy interior remake of the Candy Factory on Queen, say, than tear the damn thing down. It's a nice job. Credit where credit is due.

But when the dollars get big and you push up, up, up, neighbourhood context be damned, fellas, then your "genuine enhancements" aren't for the "urban environment" anymore -- they're for your clients and your own damn pockets. Shame, shame. It's your property, but it's everyone's city. And this junk shows no respect for that at all.

Mistake by the Lake

Bad Buildings wants to be clear: This thing, released this week, ain't bad at all -- at least as far as condos go in this architecturally backwater burgh (and Christ knows, in terms of badness, Toronto condos define a new extreme).

We mean, hey -- it's nicely proportioned, it respects its site, it has an inspired balance of built and open green space. All very cool, if it were the model for the godforsaken disaster that is (barf) Cityplace (more on that one later; but seriously, motherfucking Montage? For a condo building? You pricks ever pick up a dictionary, or does meaning not actually matter? Wait, don't answer that. We already know.)

But Bad Buildings doesn't mean to digress. See, thing is, this baby would be a welcome replacement for Montage, or Luna, or Dancing Gary's Happy Palace or whatever the fuck else Cityplace calls its dog's-breakfast mixed bag of truly offensive architecture. But it ain't. It's just another barrier between city and lake, parked at the foot of Yonge Street -- yes, the city's identity-bearing north-south artery -- on one of the last, best waterfront sites. The project, on old Marine Terminal 27, will be a pretty solid barrier from the water -- like we don't have enough of those already -- and be a significant step in further divorcing most Torontonians from the waterfront. Correct us if we're wrong, but hasn't the current administration whined incessantly -- nay, campaigned on the idea -- that waterfront access is the right of every citizen?

Bullshit. Mr. Mayor Miller, he of the waterfront development "vision," won't even weigh in on this disaster, but his councillors have -- mostly with a shrug. Nothing we can do, they say.

The hell there isn't. We never thought we'd say it, but this town has to be a little more like Vancouver (bleh, we think we just puked in our mouth a little). At least sleepyland by the sea has some standards in place these days; they treat property development in their pretty town, and on its scant few vacant acres, as a privelege. Toronto developers think development is their right. Big, big difference.

When will this town stand up to these bullies who are ruining our city? But then, what does it matter? It may already be too late.

How do you spell brutal? L-I-B-E-S-K-I-N-D

Everyone's got to start somewhere, and Bad Buildings has to give mad props to Daniel Libeskind, the putz who proposes this nasty bit of business be welded on to the Hummingbird Centre at Yonge and Front. Congrats, DL -- you've given us exactly the stinker we needed, released in the Toronto Star today, to start this bitch with a bang.

(Oh, and fuck you, Martin Knelman, for calling this piece of shit (gak) "razzle dazzle," when REAL architecture critics, like your own estimable Chris Hume spoke the truth and called it trash.)

But Danny's incompetence could be a double-edged sword for your humble critic. I mean, that thing is so idiotic, such a moronic, insensitive application of form and material, such an over-the-top example of willful ignorance regarding the context of the urban fabric, not to mention a complete disregard for scale, there's not a hell of a lot we can say that his totally ass, ah, "design" doesn't already say for itself. I mean, come, DL -- what inspired you, a cat in heat, stiffening her tail in anticipation of getting the old high hard one? Surely you can do better than that.

Then again, remember that nasty bit of subterfuge about the ROM's "Crystal"? It was supposed to be glass, DL, remember? Oh, wait, you didn't know the structure couldn't support the weight of glass cladding, and neither did any of your engineers until you started. Riiiiiiight.

We damn well should have known better, I guess. But never let it be said that a Toronto developer let a marketing opportunity be squashed by good architecture. No sir, that would be a violation of the Toronto developer code -- a secret document tattooed, no doubt , on Concord Cityplace CEO Terry Hui's ass.

Back to the (ha) crystal. It should have been a good enough warning of what to expect from artiste-for-hire inc. I've never seen a self-described visionary so quick to compromise his vision when there's a buck to be lost. So what do we get? A jagged aluminum shed. Cultural renaissance, my ass. Try cultural regression. Thanks, buddy. Thanks a ton.

But don't worry, DL. In condo-crazy Toronto, extreme badness is accepted. Encouraged, even. Want to fuck up a tidy little exercise in picture-perfect late modernism, like the Hummingbird? The door's open! Welcome home, pal. As the new standard-bearer of brutal buildings, you'll be welcomed as the conquering hero. Bruce Kuwabara can be heard breathing a sigh of relief from blocks away ...