The Gaslight District | completed

[Spokes]

Now THAT feels welcoming! haha

[ac3r]

This is such a sad project. Right beside what could have been a really unique area of our region with beautiful stone warehouses. Basically set up for high end shops, breweries and restaurants. A mini distillery district. But no such thought was put into the Precast monstrosity that are these towers. The random white strips are do not make it more visually appealing. Based on the placement of caulking joints it looks like they fucked up on the panel sizes in places. A simple idea they should have done is just to make it all a consistent colour and panel size, then build a metal or mesh frame around the exterior to accommodate the vines or other creeping greenery. https://greenscreen.com/shared/2020/06/g...pdf?x70762

Yeah. This could have been so good, becoming as you said something like a distillery district in terms of having a character of old and new. There was so much potential here and it was all thrown away due to a greedy, money hungry developer that cut back on costs - outright stating to both architectural teams to redesign things to save money. Now this area is ruined forever. It's not the fault of the architects, fortunately. The developers should feel absolutely ashamed of themselves. I'd love to see them forced to live here lol, with their windows all facing the worst view of the podium imaginable.

What an absolute pity and I won't blame the citizens of Cambridge from speaking out against future proposals if they're just going to get bait and switched like this. It's the same sort of offense the people of Kitchener got with Duke Tower but 100 times worse due to how it has destroyed the neighbouring historical buildings.

If I had a billion dollars I'd have this torn down and properly rebuilt.

[Kodra24]

Brutal - already looks dated, by at least a few decades

[Chris]

I think you are all trying to gaslight me into thinking this is an ugly development...

[Belmonster]

If I had a billion dollars I'd have this torn down and properly rebuilt.

It's frustrating that once a bad development is in place there's basically nothing that can be done about it.  Sometimes I wish we could vote for one bad building to be demolished each year, like contestants on Survivor choosing who's going to be next to leave the island.

[plam]

If I had a billion dollars I'd have this torn down and properly rebuilt.

It's frustrating that once a bad development is in place there's basically nothing that can be done about it.  Sometimes I wish we could vote for one bad building to be demolished each year, like contestants on Survivor choosing who's going to be next to leave the island.

Speaking of deprecated architecture, NY Times on suburban office parks. Basically these bad buildings are all going to go away and be replaced by housing maybe?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/upsho...-park.html

(I guess there's a paywall?)

[bravado]

Went downtown to get some beverages from Foundry Brewing and decided to get a better angle shot than my previous monstrosities.



[size=1][/size]

[bravado]

They're putting up what's most likely to be some horrendous 'flair' on the podium facing Grand Ave.

Also, can this thread be marked as "Complete" now that construction is mostly over?

[cherrypark]

Ah yes, the solar concentrators to vaporize pedestrians.

[ac3r]

Haha. It just keeps getting worse. What a disaster.

[bravado]

there won't be any complaining pedestrians if they're all fried to a crisp

[ac3r]

I officially proclaim this building: The Cambridge Death Ray

Who the hell thought that would be a good idea? Looks absolutely horrendous haha. In 10 years that'll have rust spots, dents and scratchiti all over it.

[bravado]

I officially proclaim this building: The Cambridge Death Ray

Who the hell thought that would be a good idea? Looks absolutely horrendous haha. In 10 years that'll have rust spots, dents and scratchiti all over it.

It looks like some sort of glass thing and not metal, but I don’t have the right SPF to get close to it and check.

[ac3r]

Hah. I hope so, but it looks like metal to me based on the distorted reflection it's creating. It's very randomized where something glass would be a heck of a lot smoother. And if it was some sort of glass I don't think it would be mounted like that, it would surely require something other than galvanized steel studs. Maybe they're using some new/obscure architectural material I don't know but I can't imagine...this was ABA and HIP and they sadly didn't put enough money into what could have been an amazing project.

The funny thing is that nothing about this matches anything else. Like, the initial idea was to blend historic industrial buildings with a new development. The architects had this idea to mix that with a contemporary set of towers, which had the parking podium wrapped in some kind of mesh metal grille. While we would have been able to tell it was just parking behind it, it would have looked okay. The developer actually forced the architectural team to redo it in order to save money, so they were forced to install these awful monochrome fake brick precast panels instead with a weird ass stripe pattern for some reason. I don't know if they realized everyone hates it and that it was a total eyesore and that made them try to "fix" it with this death ray nonsense or not, but I would imagine so. Except I am assuming the architect hired for that (no idea if ABA Architects was behind this or not) was again told they have to do it with X amount of dollars, so they stuck a very inexperienced person on it and told them to use spend as little money as possible.

And this is the result.

Maybe as a meme we could keep complaining and see how much more damage they can do? Heh. Maybe all it needs are some strips of LED lights that use colours that are entirely unrelated to the rest of the building aesthetic like SRM and IN8 did with Duke Tower after everyone said their Minecraft wool podium was equally as terrible. Could get some flashing neon greens and pinks, perhaps.

[ac3r]

Sad thing is, they could have made the podium look great with the original idea. A metal grille? Soooooooo simple to have it look great in day or night. Example:

For reference, here's the original podium design they had with the metal grilles and exposed parking podium. With the right lighting at night, it would have looked great.

Instead we got stripes and death rays! The University of Waterloo School of Architecture is a 3 minute walk away, by the way, lmfao.