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.