Christopher Hume thinks Toronto’s aversion to tall buildings is silly.
What can be said of a city that fears growing up?
In Toronto’s case, mere mention of the word highrise is enough to turn grown men and women into frightened children. Anywhere, they say, but please, not in my neighbourhood. Not where it might block the view from my kitchen window, or cast a shadow on my backyard.Yet despite Toronto’s fear of heights, the city keeps reaching higher and higher. And strangely, even though residents scream whenever a tall building is proposed, once they’re up, they’re filled to capacity.
City bureaucrats and politicians have been singularly inept at quelling these fears, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that several hundred local planners, architects and development industry types showed up at a one-day conference last week devoted to tall buildings.
3 comments
I haven’t read Hume’s article yet, but he has a point… it’s not the height of buildings that effects a street or city, it’s how those buildings interact with those around it and how it meets the street.
A great example is Yonge vs. Bay:
Bay between College and Bloor is very impersonal and bland – a wide street with tall buildings, many without street-level retail (and those that do have it hidden behind pillars, etc), which does not encourage use of the street by people – making any stores/restaurants come by success with difficulty.
Yonge on the other hand, for the most part between Bloor and Dundas has kept it’s people-centric character because of strict zoning controls which have kept streetfront buildings at the 2-3 story height. While tall condos are being built, they are set back from Yonge (like the Pantages, or the planned Uptown) behind human-scale buildings on the sidewalk.
The sunlight issue is a valid one – but vastly overstated – tall thin buildings do not swallow a city into darkness – the shadows are move quickly and are only very noticable in the short days of winter when the sun is low in the sky, or very early in the morning or late at night.
Another thing to remember is big buildings with lots of glass are excellent mirrors, sometimes creating two or 3 reflections of the sun at various times of day (College between Bay & Elizabeth is very very bright at around 4:30 these days, due to the real sun and the “artificial” sun reflected off the Maclean Hunter building at College Park).
I like Hume, but I think he has a tendency to overstate the issue. Toronto has a large number of tall buildings being proposed or under construction, and many of these appear to have no strongly organized resistance. Think Pure Spirit, Spire, CityPlace, Residences of College Park, 18 Yorkville, Vu, Murano, the Met, for instance, all with heights of 40 or so storeys and up, and no real sustained opposition.
I think for some of the buildings that have been controversial, it’s perfectly understandable why. The ROM proposal was terrible, the Scrivener Square proposal seemed inappropriate, and though I am not necessarily convinved that One Bedford is a bad thing, I understand the opposition to it. And I understand the community opposition captured by the Active 18 folk.
There is some hysteria and nimbyism out there – but given that there is so much construction of so many tall residential buildings out there – I just think he’s overstating the issue. At any rate, a little community opposition sometimes does wonders to improve a developer’s plan.
I think one of the issues is that Hume is talking a quite different language from community activists. Hume looks at tall buildings in individual aesthetic terms – are they well designed? Do them make an impressive skyline?
Whereas community activists are thinking in terms of the ground-level community space — do they contribute to or detract from the local community? And also in terms of politics — are they following a fair and transparent process? Are they playing by the rules?
I’ve seen Hume write, essentially, how can anyone oppose a building that is so well designed? Which is just such a completely different mind-space from the reasons people oppose tall buildings that it’s no wonder the two sides find each other baffling.