{"id":12270,"date":"2012-11-13T08:30:14","date_gmt":"2012-11-13T12:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingatlantic.ca\/?p=12270"},"modified":"2013-01-21T04:46:37","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T08:46:37","slug":"facadism-halifaxs-dirty-dance-with-its-heritage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/atlantic\/2012\/11\/13\/facadism-halifaxs-dirty-dance-with-its-heritage\/","title":{"rendered":"Fa\u00e7adism – Halifax’s dirty dance with its heritage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

HALIFAX<\/strong> – Who says Halifax is anti-development? For that matter, who says downtown is dead? Looking around the city core right now (if we can ignore the pit of continual frustration that has come to symbolize the Tex Park\/Twisted Sisters\/Skye Halifax site) there are loads of exciting projects on the go. But taking a closer look at many of them, a not-so-exciting trend emerges. A lot of the projects, while ostensibly involving a fine balance of development and heritage preservation, are really just demolitions in everything but name.<\/p>\n

I know\u2014a lot of people don’t want to hear more talk about heritage. They want development, progress, etc. Well, so do I. But, maybe naively, I was under the impression that the city was getting both. Instead, the city’s preferred means of preservation is now the mutually unsatisfying\u00a0compromise known as fa\u00e7adism.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

First, the good: an excellent \u00a0example of how preserving the “bones” of a building while\u00a0restructuring\u00a0it can be a boon for heritage and for development is\u00a0the\u00a0Barrington Espace<\/a>\u00a0renovation project, a sympathetic example of adaptive reuse. But most fa\u00e7adism is a lot less\u00a0successful, and with the strategy quickly becoming the preferred means of \u201cpreservation,\u201d heritage advocates might start trying to convince developers that preserving entire structures isn’t just a nice thing to do\u2014it can\u00a0can actually make them a lot of money.<\/p>\n

A textbook case study is\u00a0Denver\u2019s wildly successful<\/a> lower downtown historic district, a 23-block span of warehouse buildings that makes the Historic Properties<\/a> look a bit pitiful by comparison. In the ’80s, it was a neglected neighbourhood plagued by poverty and vacant buildings, ripe for demolition. Property owners didn’t much like the idea of turning it into a historic district and restricting demolition, but in the end, the designation\u2014which preserved an attractive, old-school urban streetscape of the sort that now boast the highest real-estate values on the continent\u2014was\u00a0a key element in the city’s downtown revitalization. And it made a lot of people a lot richer. (Since 1981,according to the piece, \u00a0heritage preservation in the state of Colorado has also created 35,000 jobs.)<\/p>\n

With that in mind, here\u2019s a quick run-down of some of the worst planned or under-construction fa\u00e7adectomies in Halifax. And for each, a hypothetical, possibly fanciful, but at least plausible heritage-preserving alternative solution, inspired by real-world examples.<\/p>\n

1. RBC Tower expansion (Royal Centre)<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Unveiled at the 2010 VivaCity conference, this was conceived as a sort of second phase of the TD Tower expansion. It would see a bulked up RBC tower swallow the Champlain<\/a> and Merrill Lynch<\/a> buildings, stapling their remains to a sheer wall of glass. The early renderings found online (click\u00a0here to view<\/a>)\u00a0reveal terrible massing and an awful relationship to adjoining streets. And of course, it would eliminate two functional, attractive, urban-scaled structures from the city\u2019s already diminished historical stock.<\/p>\n

What if?<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Given the current high vacancy rate for Class-A office space, this might end up dying on the books. But if it proceeds, the best strategy could be to meet the developer halfway with a density-bonusing scheme. The tower expansion could go up rather than out, gaining a few extra storeys to increase its square footage. In exchange, the existing buildings would be fully preserved. This may involve an exception to HRM by Design\u2019s height restrictions\u2014but the trade-off would be worth it.<\/p>\n

2. Roy Building<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The already-approved demolition will see the Roy Building knocked down (along with two smaller buildings on the corner of\u00a0Sackville and Granville)\u00a0and an ersatz reproduction built as the podium for a tower. Barrington Street will lose its most massive 19th-century frontage, as well as a perfectly contextualized building. What we’ll get, is, well, who knows? These renderings don’t give much sense of what a reconstructed Roy would really look like.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n


\nWhat if?<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Five St. Joseph<\/a> is a downtown development in Toronto, in which the developer is taking advantage of an especially deep block to build a 48-storey condo tower<\/a> fronting Yonge Street, while preserving (in their entirety) a row of three-storey Victorians currently on the site. (A warehouse in the rear will be gutted to accommodate the tower.) A great example of development as city-building, the project has created a lot of goodwill for the developer.<\/p>\n

While the Roy Building is located on a slightly shallower block, it\u2019s still a huge structure\u2014almost split into two buildings, one fronting Barrington, and another fronting Granville Street. It\u2019s not a perfect solution, but a preservation of the Barrington-facing portion could allow a slender tower to be constructed where the Granville-facing portion currently sits. It would be vastly superior to a facadectomy, or worse, the proposal the city is currently faced with.<\/p>\n

3. Waterside Centre<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Armour Group, after a lot of wrangling over the heritage elements, ended up gutting most of the block at the northeast corner of Duke and Hollis to accommodate a nine-storey office building. It’ll probably look okay. But considering the potential, and the location adjacent to the Historic Properties, it\u2019s not nearly good enough.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For a hypothetical example of what might have been done, we can look to Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. (Not to laud Toronto too much\u2014I only return to its example because I\u2019m familiar with it. It would be very easy to supply a list of \u00a0heritage tragedies in that city as well.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This film<\/a> provides a brilliant overview of the long, painful restoration of the once-grand Gladtsone, which spent the last half of the 20th century as a dismal flophouse. It was in such disrepair that one company\u2014which specialized in heritage restoration\u2014gave up on it. Today, it’s the cornerstone of a revitalized and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, due in no small part to its heritage cachet. The surrounding area has since become a veritable candyland of new condos and pricey, profitable real-estate.<\/p>\n

What if?<\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Could a Gladstone-esque solution, with a boutique hotel or premium retail, have worked here, adjacent to a heavily-touristed, high-traffic heritage district? That\u2019s a leading question, but it’s worth asking. Waterside could, conceivably, have been built on one of downtown\u2019s nearby fallow or underused blocks. Of course Armour Group doesn’t own those lots. Again, it’s worth asking why it was more economical, in their view, to acquire and gut usable buildings, even with so much underperforming real estate in the vicinity.<\/p>\n

Where do we go from here?<\/span><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s the city\u2019s job, in many cases, to provide incentives for developers to take these costlier but superior routes\u2014tax exemptions, grants, density bonusing, etc.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s the job of heritage advocates to convince developers to go this route. Because,\u00a0as of 2012, the most successful neighbourhoods in North America, boasting the highest property values, tend to be heritage areas. People want to be around them, they want to work in them, and they want to live in them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And because fa\u00e7adism isn\u2019t preservation. It\u2019s a last-ditch, better-than-nothing quasi-solution.\u00a0Halifax has already lost way too much to lose much more \u2014 and Halifax can do a lot better.<\/p>\n


\nPhotos by Kevin Brine<\/a>,\u00a0pbaladad<\/a>, Lydon Lynch\u00a0Architects<\/a>, Starfish Properties<\/a>, and\u00a0@tbpHFX<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HALIFAX – Who says Halifax is anti-development? For that matter, who says downtown is dead? Looking around the city core right now (if we can ignore the pit of continual frustration that has come to symbolize the Tex Park\/Twisted Sisters\/Skye Halifax site) there are loads of exciting projects on the go. But taking a closerContinue reading “Fa\u00e7adism – Halifax’s dirty dance with its heritage”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8099,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[362,5860,5864],"tags":[338,351,420,5685,381,5683,5684],"class_list":["post-12270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-community","category-features","tag-community-development","tag-halifax","tag-hrmbydesign","tag-st-joseph","tag-toronto","tag-torontos-gladstone-hotel","tag-waterside-centre"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFa\u00e7adism - Halifax's dirty dance with its heritage - Spacing Atlantic<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/atlantic\/2012\/11\/13\/facadism-halifaxs-dirty-dance-with-its-heritage\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fa\u00e7adism - Halifax's dirty dance with its heritage - Spacing Atlantic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"HALIFAX – Who says Halifax is anti-development? 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