For centuries a city of brick, Toronto is now a city of glass. Hundreds of buildings have gone up across the city with sleek contemporary architecture in the past ten years. These buildings are covered in glass, often with minimalist architecture such as patterns of lines.
With their sparse details, many people wonder how these towers will age. Toronto developers built similarly styled buildings in the 1960s. Some were great successes and are still admired to this day like the office towers of the TD Centre; others like the apartment towers of St. James Town are roundly condemned as generic ‘slab towers’.
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What’s remarkable about the apartment towers from the 1960s and 1970s is how poorly they have aged in terms of architecture. Generally wide in proportion with simple brick walls and rows of balconies, they are not the kind of landmarks Torontonians take pride in like the CN Tower or the bank towers at King and Bay. They also lack the appeal of a Victorian Bay and Gable house.
What makes the current crop of simple glass condos different?
These days, there are more variations in architectural details in the podiums and along the façades of towers. Proportions are more elegant than the repetitive wide floor plates of 1960s apartments. Rather than sprawling over a large area with seldom used lawns, today’s towers are generally more compact and incorporate storefronts to make communities more walkable and vibrant.
Simply put, architecture has improved substantially for residential buildings since the 1960s in Toronto.
For all that, people are right to be concerned. Many towers still seem repetitive and generic when their minimalist details are hard to notice. Cresford’s Casa, for instance, was a fascinatingly simple tower at 33 Charles Street completed in 2010 with floor after floor of glass walls wrapped with balcony slabs and glass railings. Since the subsequent phases look almost the same as the original, however, the idea seems less inspired and duller.
The alternatives to glass towers are mostly towers with historical revival styles like Gothic and Art Deco. One St. Thomas near U of T got it right; but developers working on a lower budget have produced buildings without the charm of the historical styles they imitate—the cost of the artistic details of the original styles is too high. Contemporary styles are often most economical to produce with architectural flair and genuine details.
The style of our buildings has to change and evolve. All buildings need to have some distinguishing architectural character for long-term value. Will the architecture of our new glass condo towers be appreciated in 20 years as the buildings age?
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