Despite spirited protests from city planners and local homeowners, the $175-million Minto Midtown condominium development, about to rise in Toronto's Yonge and Eglinton neighbourhood, was never in any real danger of being squashed while winding its way through the approval process.
Big money, of the kind wielded by big real estate developers such as Ottawa-based Minto, tends to win urban-design battles. This Teflon-coated unbeatability is one reason some people hate developers.
Another has to do with what developers so often give us: large, mediocre buildings, thrown up to make a lot of money fast, without a civic-minded thought for urban or architectural values.
It's all quite enough to make any responsible citizen nervous, upon seeing the real estate industry moving troops into the neighbourhood and taking up positions for a big dig.
While some Yonge-Eglinton residents who opposed Minto Midtown will likely be miffed by their defeat indefinitely, others could start feeling better soon after the towers begin to go up. Minto Midtown promises to be a project that is both large and remarkably good, and an engaging architectural experiment in building tall and well -- and dwelling densely -- on Toronto streets.
If you simply don't like tall buildings, of course, no amount of goodness will be enough to justify a building as big as what's happening at Yonge and Eglinton. This opinion, by the way, is one I find easy to understand, even though I admire the idea of tall buildings very much.
Skyscrapers are easy to dislike. After expressways and the street grid (and the odd curiosity, like the CN Tower or the SkyDome), they are the biggest built structures in the urban landscape, and all but the most refined ones are inclined to loom and bully and swagger. And though the technology necessary for building tall structures has been available for a century, the "right" skyscraper architecture remains elusive -- unless, as I suspect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Toronto-Dominion Centre really solves the problem of tall building design for all time.
But Minto Midtown is as right as a skyscraper project is likely to be, in these post-Miesian days.
Designed in the main by Chicago architectural giant Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and in detail by Toronto's E. H. Zeidler, the two slender towers of Minto Midtown (52 and 38 storeys) start at a broad base pressed snugly against the sidewalk, step back and soar upward, then end their ascent in skyline crowns. This three-part movement recalls the architecture of the brief, bright and ominous cultural moment -- it came at the end of the Jazz Age, just as the Great Depression got serious -- when New York got such memorable skyscrapers as the Chrysler Building (1930), the Empire State Building (1931) and the Waldorf-Astoria (1931).
At five storeys -- a good height for this part of town -- and with shops and restaurants at street level and balconied lofts above, the podium will give a solid jolt of urbane visual energy to Yonge Street by reinforcing, and bringing uptown, Toronto's venerable downtown tradition of living over the store.
The project responds to context in still other ways.
The Yonge-Eglinton area, with its many attractive apartment slabs, has long been home to urbanites who like high-density living arrangements, and the quick access to downtown made possible by the subway.
Minto Midtown will complement these existing structures of big-city life.
It will also add something unusual to Yonge Street: a common entrance in the form of a circular landscaped courtyard, a green feature that could stand to be larger. (While they are redoing things, the designers might also give some attention to the building tops, which look like prickly little hats in the current model.)
The general shape of the scheme is, however, its only connection to the Romantic Skyscraper Era, circa 1930. Instead of the largely opaque stone sheath of the Empire State (for example), the exterior surfaces of Minto Midtown are pure mid-century Modernism: gleaming cascades of aluminum-framed glass and balconies falling clean to the stone and glass podium at ground level.
If we're lucky, this clear-glass curtain wall will embody some of the same sophistication and luminous ambiguity that make Mies's Toronto-Dominion Centre so extraordinarily beautiful. I don't think anybody will miss the blankly monotonous, routine escarpments of reflective glass used in too many Toronto tall buildings.
I, for one, will definitely not miss the grandiose clots of plaster and "neo-traditional" fustians of faux stone that are junking up too many residential buildings of all sorts these days.
In choosing to move with highly successful precedents of 20th-century Modern styling, the makers of Minto Midtown have designed conservatively, but with sober urban intelligence.