(02-23-2023, 06:40 PM)nms Wrote: Where was George-Eugène Haussmann when you needed him?
If you were able to wave a magic wand over the Northdale neighbourhood, which architectural style or era should have been the guiding force for the neighbourhood?
The contemporary era. We've got centuries of architectural knowledge to draw on. You can make some real cool stuff now.
The problem is the City of Waterloo has no standards, so they just rubber stamp whatever meats the bare minimum and/or doesn't offend NIMBYs. You can have amazing looking student housing if you have standards and expectations to be meet.
Some examples...sorry if this website ends up prompting you to sign up to view more though I don't think it will if you just open each link separately. It's free to do so, but they annoyingly prompt you to sign up after you scroll a bit (worth signing up however, Divisare constantly posts incredible stuff with high quality photographs of new architectural works all over the world):
https://divisare.com/projects/431646-ate...ege-berlin
https://divisare.com/projects/385011-lan...ing-school
https://divisare.com/projects/435778-bru...ire-daubie
https://divisare.com/projects/464168-mar...as-didelon
https://divisare.com/projects/457286-mar...-di-milano
https://divisare.com/projects/455236-mat...ommodation
https://divisare.com/projects/448599-max...n-hainholz
https://divisare.com/projects/451703-vur...nervahaven
Though, to be honest, the biggest reason this stuff sucks? It's private. A lot of the projects just linked and many student housing projects overall, are somehow linked to the school itself. Virtually everything that has popped up in Northdale is just some mediocre private developer gobbling up cheap land, hiring the cheapest architect, the cheapest construction contractors and making a subpar student apartment building and then allowing some terrible landlord to manage it (the horror stories from students about these buildings is probably longer than Prout's À la recherche du temps perdu). So long as we allow these developers to operate with out any sort of design advisory board as you find in major cities like Toronto, then developers have no need to spend extra time or money hiring an architect to do a good job. The bar is just really low.