Station Park | 18, 28, 36, 43, 50 fl | U/C

[cherrypark]

The real solution is to simply encourage developers to care about the architecture of their buildings. Most architects are talented with not just architecture, but design and art as well. You don't need to make developers consider putting their money into murals if the building looks good in the first place.

Problem is, this is Waterloo Region. It isn't important to their bottom line. They'll spend the bare minimum and unless we change our building and planning rules, you'll have to deal with these ugly and usually poorly made buildings.

I really don't think that beauty comes from a set of government standards... Beauty comes from people actually caring about a place and that's really fucking hard to create and maintain when so many are in the business of just extracting as much as they can and moving on - local government included.

How do we create better "customers" for architects and better citizens that demand more from the built environment?

Would be interesting to me to see are more dynamic process for positive design input from panels of candidate residents, current residents (not just the NIMBYs), etc. Especially if that rewarded some faster or easier pass through approvals that did have economic upside.