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One Bedford - Let the fight begin!

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#1 ·
Rumble in the Annex will define city

The fight over One Bedford is a contest of wills based on differing urban values

By JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
Friday, February 4, 2005 - Page G2

An impending battle over the high-rising of Toronto's Bloor Street West could mark a crucial turning point in the current controversy about the city we want.

At issue is a pair of linked condominium towers (34 and 18 or 19 storeys) proposed for the northeast corner of Bloor Street and Bedford Road. One Bedford, as the project is known, will not be the first large building to go up along the Bloor border of Toronto's quiet, dignified Annex neighbourhood. It will, however, be a clear signal that supersized residential skyscrapers are on the march west of Avenue Road along Bloor.

Last week, worried residents fired off the latest salvo in the controversy over One Bedford. Among other indictments in a detailed report addressed to City of Toronto planning officials, the Annex Residents Association (ARA) lists the "extreme height" of the proposed towers and the long shadows that will be cast by them over neighbouring streets.

The ARA questions the appropriateness of dropping such tall structures into a streetscape only two to 12 storeys high.

"Approval of this proposed project will form a dangerous precedent to further redevelopment along Bloor Street West," the report warns. "This is a real threat to the Annex, as it will unquestionably lead to an Annex geographically isolated and shadowed by high-rise buildings. The ARA takes this threat to our neighbourhood as seriously [as] when the Spadina Expressway posed a similar destructive threat in the 1970s."

To any Torontonian familiar with the expressway wars of 35 years ago, them's fightin' words. Around 1970, in Toronto's most spectacular civil conflict since the Rebellion of 1837, citizens' groups protested and eventually blocked an extensive highway expansion that would have inflicted terrible injury on downtown Toronto, including the Annex.

Viewed simply as an artwork, the sophisticated scheme at One Bedford does not seem to be an embodiment of such urban evil. Designed by the well-known Toronto firms of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg (KPMB) and Page + Steele Architects Planners, the two modernist tower blocks will sit atop a conventional eight-storey limestone base meant to line up with the face of the Intercontinental Hotel next door.

The taller glass and masonry block (34 storeys from grade) will boldly address busy Bloor West, while the shorter (at 18 or so storeys from grade) will rise from a courtyard entrance at the rear of the site, where the Annex's pleasant, tree-lined streets begin. "Bloor Street West is our Fifth Avenue, so [One Bedford] has to have a certain gravitas," KPMB's Shirley Blumberg said in an interview. "It has to be a very urban building."

Whatever the merits or demerits of the building, the ARA is surely right about one thing. A success for the developers at One Bedford will almost certainly lead to the construction of yet more towers similarly high (or higher) along the north side of Bloor between Avenue Road and Spadina Avenue. I cannot think of anything, short of an economic turndown or a popular uprising, that will prevent such an outcome.

Powerful real estate people (including Lanterra Developments and H + R Developments, the builders of One Bedford) are interested in this strip of properties. Who can blame them? It's central, and it's the next logical place to go for the prime shopping district east of Avenue Road.

There are already upscale hotels along this part of Bloor, glittering in the midst of a lot of old, indifferent buildings with no urgent reason to exist.

On the south side of Bloor are a series of projects that will challenge the whole mid-town district to pull up its architectural socks. (It's about time. Most of the tall buildings in the present-day shopping alley between Yonge and Avenue Road are very dismal.)

Among these projects: Daniel Libeskind's striking extension and reorientation of the Royal Ontario Museum, now under construction; KPMB's redevelopment of the Royal Conservatory of Music; and the Woodsworth College residence by Peter Clewes and Adrian di Castri.

No wonder Annex residents are concerned. For most of the last century, their district has enjoyed relative safety from the main-street intensification taking place east of the Avenue Road DMZ. Now it's coming right down the street.

I don't expect developers or architects or Annex homeowners to appreciate what I'm about to say, but I'm looking forward to the fight over One Bedford. It promises to be a contest of intelligent wills with strong ideas, and a healthy public dispute about urban values. How badly do we want to see the genteel Annex protected from snazzy skyscrapers? How good are the arguments for opening Bloor Street west of Avenue Road to dense residential use? We may be about to find out.

jmays@globeandmail.ca

IMO, this is great news. That stretch of Bloor needs a remake and this would fit the bill. Now if only the Bloor Street Transformation Project could get off the ground!
 
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#3 ·
It's Bloor St...it's across the street from a subway station. Anybody recall the city's development plan to intensify where it makes sense?

And for crying out loud...who cares...as long as they get rid of those ugly little buildings and that Burger King.






KGB
 
#4 · (Edited)
Crappie façadism to the rescue!
Stick a cheaped out, precast and glass box on to a not so great building!
Toronto could replace it's current signature look - the cheap out, with the "Frankenstine Cheap out!"
 
#6 ·
I have faith in KPMB. They do good work.
 
G
#7 ·
The towers may seem a bit tall, but the precedent has already been set for the area...I don't see this negatively impacting the Annex at all. Hopefully there is similar retail to what is there now at the base (restaurants, etc.). What's currently there isn't the most attractive obviously, but it's a lively strip and the mix of establishments serve the area well.

If I remeber the elevations correctly, the base is pretty good.
 
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