The Gaslight District | completed

[ac3r]

I couldn't care less how the towers looked if the podium was nice too, but instead they've built this blight, and given cannon fodder to ever NIMBY in downtown Galt. 

There are very few cities in Canada with historical cores like Galt. Intensification is necessary but the number one priority should be preserving the existing fabric of the core, which this does none of, on a historical site no less.

Developers/ architects should be blacklisted for 5 years from building in the region for contributing something like this to our built form.

It had nothing to do with the architects so they shouldn't get the blame. This project was a dual project by Martin Simmons (now MartinSimmonsSweers) and ABA Architects who are both - at least usually - acceptable teams. They had originally designed an okay looking podium which you can kind of see in this post here...nothing amazing, but at least it was not offensive like this.

Anyway, I know someone who works for one of the two firms involved who was working on the master plan, but they were privy to what ABA was doing with the towers. They stated that the reason the podium ended up like this was because HIP thought it would be easier to make the prefab panels versus the more "complicated" podium design which had a lot more going on. In other words, they wanted it to be cheap and easy. Unfortunately as a result, as even a child would understand, vertical stripes will put a hell of a lot of emphasis on the height of the podium, not to mention they are just bare, blank walls of nothing. No windows, no ornament, no lighting, no art...it's just stripes and prefab bricks.

Unfortunately, it all came down to greed which is not surprising. Developers are leeches and don't really care about what they're developing as long as they see their financials increase. And unfortunately, developers are the ones who call the shots. Architects are just hired to design something, but the developers get to decide what ultimately happens.