Condo Critic: Queensway has lack of connection
November 14, 2009
Christopher Hume
By the time Queen St. becomes The Queensway, the city is over in all but name. The changes in urban planning, land use and topographic patterns are so profound, it's clear we have arrived somewhere quite different.
In this postwar landscape designed for the car, the emphasis is on separation, not connection. That made perfect sense half a century ago, when the car was still considered both a symbol and a means of mobility.
Nowadays we worry more about the enormous cost of congestion to the economy of the Toronto region, estimated to be in the vicinity of $2 billion annually.
The compactness of old Queen St. gives way here to a more spacious approach; after all, the car shrinks time and space, which means it connects everything. The number of pedestrians drops off sharply as does the architectural quality of local buildings, especially the lowrise apartment buildings, which suddenly seem to be everywhere.
chume@thestar.ca
Condo Critic
Windermere by the Lake, The Queensway: It's hard to imagine a project more ill-conceived than this large-scale development in the west end of Toronto.
Consisting of a large glass tower surrounded by brick and stone townhouses, this scheme is a study in contrasts. Big and small, contemporary and traditional, the complex that covers a lot of ground, maybe too much. Too bad nothing really fits or adds up; indeed, as an example of planning and architecture, the results here are singularly clumsy.
The most obvious problem is the townhouses, which don't seem quite real. Perhaps because of the placement and size of the large circular windows, the units feel strangely out of scale with themselves. It's as if they were made from some kind of Lego-like kid's building toy.
However, the use of stone in these same townhouses indicates a certain ambition, more on the part of the marketing department than the architects. In this sort of context, the use of a material such as this looks out of place; it serves only to highlight the discrepancy between what's promised and what's delivered.
In another location, the tower by itself could stand alone. But surrounded on every side by these townhouses, it seems under siege. It's as if it wandered in from a different development under construction in a different part of town. Aside from questions about what's the best placement of the townhouses – on or off the main street – the relationship between the various components of the scheme are at odds with each other. In fact, the lack of connection is so pronounced, it makes the project look like a parody, some critic's idea of how developer ineptitude would look.
GRADE: C-
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Email condocritic@thestar.ca.
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