(07-22-2021, 07:38 PM)jamincan Wrote: I don't see anything remotely brutalist in the design, but perhaps you meant Khrushchyovkas, which famously have tight setbacks from the street, and commercial uses in their podiums and feature frivolous architectural flourishes like we see in this building's condo hat.
Oh, I'm just talking about it from an aesthetic/design perspective! When I was doing my PhD in architecture I was entirely focused on aesthetic and design principles and theory, so that's generally how I judge buildings first. I barely know a thing about architectural engineering and whatnot.
Khrushchoby are different. Those were just modest apartment blocks made for workers, designed to be very easy to construct as they didn't require much effort to put up since it was almost all prefabricated. The setbacks are somewhat of an ideological thing, oddly enough. Soviet cities - in fact, even Vietnamese, North Korean or East German city designs - tend to share that feature. The reason for that is generally because the principles of Soviet political philosophy (which of course influenced communist or socialist countries all over the world) wanted to emphasize community, which meant that urban planners and architects designed cities, city blocks and individual buildings to emphasize the use of public space. People were encouraged to enjoy the outdoors, walk around the streets, take transit to work etc. The home was secondary, unlike here where we treat our homes as our castles to customize as much as we can.
My critique of the building is basically that it's the proposed painted (dark and light) grey concrete that will be used on the bulk of the tower that I find to look kind of brutalist. It's a fairly imposing material to use on the façade of a building IMO. I love brutalist architecture - heck, I love concrete most of all and almost all my architectural work has used stuff like concrete, CORTEN steel and glass (IMO...as Dieter Rams said, less is more :') - but this lacks any aesthetic sensibility. I have a feeling it could very well end up looking like a concrete monolith, rather than a pleasing residential building. It's very rare that a predominantly concrete residential building works. It was heavily used in British modernist/brutalist council housing and people generally found the atmosphere to be a very uninviting, psychologically negative experience and since the 1970s onward, so much of it has been recladded or outright demolished. This tower, in particular, just looks...cold. It's like a lot of the SRM Architects work. If you check out their portfolio, you can see that it suffers from a similar flaw: it's just repetitive, bland, cold uninspired and cheap.
It might look okay, but I doubt it. Nonetheless, having another 231 rental apartments added to the core of the region is a good thing so I do hope this gets built either way since the housing crisis in Canada takes precedent. Maybe bitching about aesthetic choices is a niche thing, but if we're going to be having these buildings standing for the next century...they should look as nice as they can.