Naturally Ian picked up on this piece from The Glove and Mail by Alex Bozikovic:
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… new forms have to be chosen carefully. Innovation is risky when you are dealing with streets, blocks – and, ultimately, people’s lives. But Canada’s cities are getting new buildings that are too often indistinguishable: Level a site, build a block of stores and apartments about four levels high, and drop a narrow tower on top of it. This tower-and-podium model, as it’s called, is born from Vancouver’s thoughtful urbanism. It is emerging as gospel in most of Canada’s major cities. And that’s fine.
But you can’t shape an entire city with a formula. In a panel discussion hosted by Ryerson’s Department of Architectural Science, de Vries spoke with the Toronto architect Peter Clewes of architectsAlliance. Clewes presented a criticism of the city’s tall-building guidelines: “If regulations keep us focused exclusively on one [type of building],” Clewes said, “we run the risk of a banal city.”
Economy and good city-building don’t always have to generate glass boxes. This is the lesson of MVRDV’s radical pragmatism. As working architects, they have learned “which things you can steer, and which things you can manipulate in a certain direction,” as de Vries told me.
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Banal? What, Vancouver?
I offer an addendum: monotony is only objectionable if it’s monotonous ugliness. No one objects to the monotony of Greek seaside villages, with their unvarying blue-and-white palette and cubical forms. No one objects to Venice’s four-storey limit, or the sea of Mansard roofs across old Paris, or the rows and rows of brownstones in Manhattan. When people complain about monotony or formulaic design or a lack of creative variation, what they’re really objecting to is ugliness or brutality or tackiness or thoughtlessness, made more grating by ubiquity.
We should not worry whether podium-and-tower is too convenient a formula, or over-used, or the like. We should worry whether something in that formula tends to produce ugliness. I suggest that it does not. Personally I like all those glass towers (though I’d prefer some better choices as to energy-efficiency) and will take them any day, over what we got in the 1970s—a wide variety of Brutalist slabs and dreary concrete hives, each ugly in its own distinctive way.
A grimy Stalinist podium-and-tower would be ugly, a Classically inspired podium-and-tower in glittering marble would be beautiful. We may well need better architecture in this town (and by extension, across Canada) but the formula is not the form, and repetition is not itself the problem.
There are those which were designed with care, and with sense of proportion, those I have no issue with. That which I have issue are the ones which were erected simply by connecting the dots of available windows, appropriate unit size, and allowable fsr. They weren’t cared about while they were designed, and neither must they be after.
As for those Soviet blocks, I take heart in the fact that they are now being renewed and being imbued with a sense of care that they never felt before. Maybe if they can find redemption, our forlorn towers might be also. http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/feb/03/demolish-sink-estates-homes-david-cameron-bratislava?CMP=ema-1703&CMP=