21 Weber St W + 149-151 Ontario St N | 20 fl | Proposed

[westwardloo]

Haha this is getting ridiculous.  We need a design council implemented as soon as possibly. Obviously Kitcheners design standards and Zoning are not going to work. 

This tower wouldn't look AS bad if they just got rid of the unnecessary step backs and just kept the design of floors Four-eighth all the way up the tower.  It would still be a grey bunker, but at least its design would be coherent.   

There are a few reasons why this tower is a mess, but the main reasons are, the City has designated the row houses heritage, a tower was originally proposed five years ago, and the original proposal was for no parking but NIMBY's cried wolf demanding a parking. Developers and architects in this region refuse to design a good looking parking podium.

[ac3r]

I'd love a design panel but I worry we'd find a way to screw that up as well. The biggest challenge would be finding the right people who could organize and run it and do so as objectively as possible. The one we have in Toronto has a fairly broad range of members and it works quite well due to a huge diversity of fields (architects, artists, landscape architects, urban designers etc) but this is Toronto where we have thousands of architects, planners, designers and so on and dozens of companies who work in these fields.

The issue locally, though, is that we don't have a large pool of talent to pull from who could help contribute to a project like that. There are only a handful of what I would consider talented architects at an even smaller handful of good local firms. We have a great school that teaches architecture, but these professors are busy people...trying to convince them to do even more work for free would be hard. Similarly, you'd want any panel to tackle topics of sustainability and environment, but the pool of people to use for that is not that large either. Of course you can bring in more people if you did Zoom meetings but Zoom sucks.

I just...yeah, as someone who has been involved with the design panel in Toronto, I am unsure whether we are capable of successfully replicating something like that here. There are a lot of factors that would handicap it such as our region being so small and, as mentioned, there simply not being all that many people or related firms/companies/organizations here. A risk would be that it could just become yet another unnecessary hurdle for projects to have to overcome if it was not done right.

The idea is good but there are so many issues that it has personally held me back from even attempting to propose the idea to colleagues and the city, since I'd hate for it to just fail. Though when I see buildings like this I think twice haha.

[westwardloo]

I'd love a design panel but I worry we'd find a way to screw that up as well. The biggest challenge would be finding the right people who could organize and run it and do so as objectively as possible. The one we have in Toronto has a fairly broad range of members and it works quite well due to a huge diversity of fields (architects, artists, landscape architects, urban designers etc) but this is Toronto where we have thousands of architects, planners, designers and so on and dozens of companies who work in these fields.

The issue locally, though, is that we don't have a large pool of talent to pull from who could help contribute to a project like that. There are only a handful of what I would consider talented architects at an even smaller handful of good local firms. We have a great school that teaches architecture, but these professors are busy people...trying to convince them to do even more work for free would be hard. Similarly, you'd want any panel to tackle topics of sustainability and environment, but the pool of people to use for that is not that large either. Of course you can bring in more people if you did Zoom meetings but Zoom sucks.

I just...yeah, as someone who has been involved with the design panel in Toronto, I am unsure whether we are capable of successfully replicating something like that here. There are a lot of factors that would handicap it such as our region being so small and, as mentioned, there simply not being all that many people or related firms/companies/organizations here. A risk would be that it could just become yet another unnecessary hurdle for projects to have to overcome if it was not done right.

The idea is good but there are so many issues that it has personally held me back from even attempting to propose the idea to colleagues and the city, since I'd hate for it to just fail. Though when I see buildings like this I think twice haha.

I appreciate that there are some concerns with setting up a design panel, but I think the benefits outweigh to risks. Personally I think the # 1 hurdle is we need to amalgamate before even proposing a design panel. Kitchener can't have a panel and nothing in waterloo. We can not let these developments to continue. I hate that I am forced to side with NIMBY's more and more due to developments like this.  Our cities built environments already are not the best looking, we can't afford to build ugly towers everywhere.

[cherrypark]

What is with this developer and all of their renders being floppy disk resolution. Looks awful.

[ZEBuilder]

What is with this developer and all of their renders being floppy disk resolution. Looks awful.

I did some digging and it appears that the people behind this project haven't even done a small midrise project yet so it wouldn't be surprising if this is flipped again to another developer.

From one of the documents attached to the heritage report the owner of the property appears to be Melissa Carter and her husband Lee Carter. A search shows that they are behind Real Property Management Hestia. Reading their biographies on the website it appears that they have experience in project management but that's about it, so it certainly feels like this might go down the same road as Elevate Condos since the person behind that had no experience either.

https://hestia.realpm.ca/meet-the-team

[ac3r]

Yeah...I won't be surprised if this doesn't go anywhere.

[westwardloo]

Its gone nowhere in the last 5 years, so I expect nothing will happen in the next 5 years. Probably just waiting for the "Heritage" building to deteriorate enough to demolish it.

[Square]

This lot is for sale again.