Category Archives: design

Making the wrong arguments to planning committee doesn’t help

Yesterday, Planning Committee had an over-full agenda of contentious items. This meant huge waits for the assembled throngs. All seats were taken, and there were over 70 standees / folding chairs / sitting on the floor. For a 8+ hour meeting.

The final votes were to approve various high rise developments, leading to the predictable reaction of citizen attendees that the process was unfair, rigged, or otherwise unsatisfactory.

I agree the process is unsatisfactory and might dedicate a subsequent post to suggestions to fix it. And incidentally save us all buckets of money. But a large part of the dissatisfaction yesterday comes from residents making the wrong arguments to planning committee. Most of these mistaken arguments were in evidence at the 265 Carling (at Bronson) rezoning application from 9 to 18 stories.

One of the biggest errors is making an argument that isn’t highly specific to the project in question.

Asking council to reject a high rise “because it will increase crime in the neighbourhood” doesn’t accomplish much. The claimant presented no facts to back up that opinion. If tall buildings promote crime, how come it isn’t a major problem now, given numerous apartment buildings nearby? Are buildings nine floors and under crime free while the crime wave begins on the tenth? Fact is, some high rises are crime prone. So are some town house clusters. And so are some low rise neighbourhoods. Does that mean we should ban single family homes and townhouses?

Obviously people in higher rise buildings care about their neighbourhood and crime. They were out in force at the meeting.

If high rises promote criminality, then this would be an argument for no high rises anywhere. Any and all objectors to rezoning would cite this crime-gateway-thru-highrise-living argument and no high rises would be built anywhere… which throws out a major local industry…and huge chunk of the Official Plan… to say nothing of reversing the rules in the Provincial policy statement and thus thwarting high rises in every lot, in every municipality in Ontario.

Sorry, the crime argument won’t convince planning committee to vote down the rezoning, because it was too generic (as well as probably being wrong).

It will generate [too much] traffic. Well duh, of course it will. But the proposed condo is adjacent an arterial. And yes that arterial is busy now. It will get busier in the future too. But don’t mistake the origin point of a trip with the the problem. After all, building that same high rise six blocks or sixteen blocks or sixty blocks further away will generate the same amount of traffic on that arterial. After all, those cars are going somewhere (on average, over 8 kilometres per commuter trip). On arterials.

The main influence of the origin point is that the closer it is to the central area of the city, the less vehicular traffic it will generate. Moving the 265 Carling high rise out to Bayshore or Barrhaven will generate more traffic than at Carling and Bronson because the further out you go the more every trip has to be made by car since those places have constrained walkability. Objecting to a building in the Glebe Annex because of traffic is to invite worse traffic congestion (thru more tripmaking) when the people are housed further out.

And again, if this project is bad here, then every project is bad everywhere. There simply aren’t arterial roads sitting around with tons of spare capacity nor can we force people to only drive on those spare-space roads. They’ll end up on Carling or Bronson eventually.

Sorry, the busy arterial argument is unlikely to sway council.

Building a high rise near the intersection of Carling and Bronson will make it more dangerous for high school kids to go to school or cross the street. Really? So we shouldn’t build any new buildings near any high schools? Presumably that argument applies to grade schools too. And community centres. And routes to school too. Or parks. Or routes to parks, of which our neighbourhood always had the least amount of park space of any area in the city.

Sorry, another fail.

But more people living near Glebe HS or other established schools might reduce driving and school busing. How many student parking spaces are there at Glebe?[even one?] At Woodroofe? [a bunch] At St Mark’s in Manotick?[lots and lots]. There’s a reason people like living in the built up city (walkability) and others prefer suburbs or exurbs (driveability).

The Glebe Annex neighbourhood, claimed one speaker, is family friendly, with little kids. High rises won’t have any kids. I sympathize with this emotion, I too favour kid-friendly streets. But 70-80% of households are child-free … are we proposing to forbid them to live in the Glebe? Can we force empty nesters to sell their Glebe homes to make way for breeders? Can we force them to sell only to breeders? Even at a loss?

Again, that argument wasn’t site specific to 265 Carling; and applied pretty much equally to every apartment anywhere in the city. I vaguely hope someone somewhere is compiling data about how many more people are now having babies or raising kids in apartments, given that single family homes in the central city are out of the price range of most young families.

Sunlight and views are important for some people. They are very important for me. But I don’t have a legal right to never be in the shade. Heck, you know the tall building over at Tunney’s Pasture? I sometimes see the sun setting behind it … which means I am in its shadow … despite being two kilometers away. Sorry for the speaker at Tuesday’s Planning Committee, but the the city just ain’t gonna reject a building because it blocks your view to the west, or might reduce the brightness of light. It has standards, rules, that specify a certain distance between buildings to let in light, that’s all folks.

No one has a right to forever preserve their current view of the Gatineau Hills, or the Peace Tower, or the city scape off in the distance. Development happens. Telling council to reject this high rise because it blocks your view isn’t likely to happen, and only sets you up for rejection. Council isn’t being contemptuous when it disregards arguments it hasn’t any legal or moral right to enforce. There are only a very few protected view planes in the city, and until some politician is buried on the roof of the Fitzsimmons building, the Glebe isn’t one of them.

Planners currently are concerned with controlling, manipulating, creating .. skylines. They refer to the view of several high rises as a composition. They currently like a composition that comes together to form a peak. At a node, like a transit station or major intersection. So a cluster of apartments at Bronson and Carling that has some low rises, some mid rises, and the centre a single peak tallest building, appeals to them. Ergo, pointing out that the latest building, in the centre spot, is taller than the others is perceived by planners as a virtue, not a drawback. All the more reason to approve it. And here comes the locals pointing out the very feature that planners like while mistaking it for an argument to reject the proposal.

While each approved new building is not strictly speaking a precedent that allows subsequent applications for similarly tall buildings, we all know that the emphasis in Ottawa on compatibility means that proposals that blend in have better chances of survival. So builders cite nearby buildings to justify their project. And residents cite these same buildings to argue that the new building is out of context. Both are employing precedent, one to oppose and one to propose change.

It strikes me as ironic that today’s apartment dwellers on Carling object to a new high rise while themselves living in buildings that when proposed a generation ago were “out of context” and incompatible, according their then-neighbours. And those two storey houses built by the tract-builders of the day may have irritated those that preferred the Glebe when it was semi-rural. You know, those folks that in their turn displaced the original forest dwellers of the area.

So when I read that residents attending planning committee leave feeling that their concerns were ignored, that the process was a sham, that it was all cooked or pre-determined, or that councillors were showing contempt by checking their emails, whispering with staff, or other wise multi-tasking, I both agree that its a messy system, and feel that a big part of the problem is people bringing the wrong arguments. I would never have the patience to be a councillor listening to irrelevant arguments all day. In fact I couldn’t take being a spectator at the Tuesday’s session, and left before noon.

Celebration in Florida

Celebration is a well-known new-urbanist town near Orlando, Florida. In January 2013 I spent about two days there, and came away very impressed. Like other new urbanist towns it takes it architectural and layout cues from pre-1940 successful American towns. It is an attempt to build today neighbourhoods similar to successful walkable areas like the Glebe, Hintonburg, Westboro, Dalhousie … rather than the overtly car-centric suburban model that has dominated our cities since the mid-20th century.

Does it succeed? Can we recreate the successful neighbourhoods of the past?

I must say I visited with a sceptical mind. I had been there about a decade ago and it then looked very new, plastic-y, and eerily empty. While the housing crash of the last decade suffocated the market for new houses, and resale values sagged, there is new construction there now and house prices are climbing back to the pre-crash levels. The town prohibits short term rentals or vacation villas, which may have helped keep people invested in the success of the town. The town is large enough — about 4500 households, and 500 businesses — that it takes on the flavour of a real place. There were few vacancies. There are pedestrians everywhere, and school-age kids playing in the courtyards. I don’t know what its future build-out population will be, but it is readily apparent to the observant that almost everything is designed to be expanded or to grow. There is even provision for future infills.

Celebration comes under increased scrutiny and criticism because of its largest corporate founder, The Disney Corporation, although they are no longer active in developing or managing the town. They spent lots of money — I heard $2.5 billion — establishing services, hiring the best architects in America to design the signature buildings, and laying out the prototype neighbourhoods. Like other new urbanist projects, it has a pre-1940′s feel, but there is a huge variety of housing types and styles, including streamline moderne and art deco. The overall composition of the place now gives it an identity of its own, rather than looking like cutouts from a architectural style book.

I was particularly impressed by the variety of housing types very close to each other, in a fine-grained mix that for almost a century our urban planing professionals tried so hard to zone out of most other towns where segregation of housing types and land uses is the rule. In addition to the mix of housing formats, there is a huge variety of household incomes and house prices in close proximity to other types. It is not a retirement community.

There is a downtown, and this is the hardest place to create from scratch in a new urbanist project. The downtown has to have a variety of businesses for synergy, reasons for people to go there, and a hinterland of residences. Then it also has to work to break the traditional suburban format of stores with large parking lots and drive throughs. People have to re-learn that they can enjoy walking to shops and services, and that there is something worthwhile at the end of the walk (a later visit to another new urbanist town that failed make the contrasts striking).

above: ground floor apartments in the blocks surrounding the downtown are designed to be converted into storefronts or offices as the town grows. Several blocks already have been converted, a planned mimicry of natural growth.

above: typical mainstreet three story office and retail

above: banks are walk-in, not drive-through

above: the core business area is cheek-to-jowl with businesses and restuarants that animate the streets

above: streets are kept distinct from each other by architectural style, types of street trees, dominant colours, and a variety of building widths. Typically, storefronts all have apartments above.

above: behind the streets lined with stores are the access points to residential buildings and some mid-block parking lots. Each large parking lot had a number of gaps opening up to the surrounding streets, which makes future infill of larger buildings possible. A plan for everything — including change.

above: there were many busy restaurants and pubs, including some inexpensive ones, along the lake-front They were crowded at lunch, mid-afternoon, dinner, and evening hours with crowds thinning out after 8pm.

above: can a one sided mainstreet work? Celebration tries, with its retail core fronting onto a lake with rocking chairs and public umbrellas. The space was busy with strollers, dog-walkers, etc. The current downtown is like one wedge of a circle, with the lake at the centre, and obviously can be expanded in segments to surround the whole lake should the town continue to grow.

The downtown hasn’t any dilapidated buildings, so it doesn’t truly reflect the natural ageing process and variety in established cities. The street decor and storefronts weren’t obviously synthetic or overdone, but were a step up from what one finds on Preston, Bank Street in the Glebe, or Westboro. It might be fair to say they were like the ” best” blocks of those streets.

Burlington Design Smarts

Every place offers new twists and variations on urban design. My fall visit to Burlington revealed some interesting ones that were not on Church Street Marketplace. (see the previous series a week or so ago on Burlington, this completes that series)

One of the streets dead-ended at the lake. It terminated in a traffic circle. A mini-traffic circle. Can you imagine Ottawa’s engineers designing something so tight you couldn’t drive a 53′ tractor trailer around it at 50kmh??

At the lakefront park, they had park benches mounted as swings. They looked glorious. They looked fun. But I dunno how well they worked, because while we hung around for a half hour, no one vacated their swing.

Also at the park, we saw people actually having fun. You know, enjoying themselves. Actively. And not just doing tonsil inspections. This young lady has installed a tight rope between trees and practiced stunts on it.

Can you imagine the reaction of a Ottawa by-law officer or NCC conservation officer: Do you have a permit? Where is your safety mat? Where is your helmet? You know, you could get hurt if you fall down (and might sue us). Where is your crowd control persons to keep bystanders safe?

Ma’m, Ma’m, you have a dog there ! It’s NOT on a leash! It might run around! You should take him to the official off-leash dog park zone 26 blocks away! Ma’m, get off that rope and talk to me! Pay attention ! This is a park for christ-sakes !

With much rumbling and roaring, a freight train passed by on the edge of the park. Everyone stopped to watch it. Children (and some adults, the self-confident ones) waved. The engineer tooted and revved his engine. Dogs barked. No need for a multi-million dollar railway relocation scheme putting the tracks into a deep ditch. Spend your (our) money on something more immediately useful.

Confederation Line (iii) – Baby it’s cold inside

Dashing thru the snow ….

The RTG literature for the new Confederation Line assures us repeatedly that their equipment runs in cold and snowy climates. Given those frequent winter stories in the mass media that we live in the coldest (capital) city in the world, I’d feel much better knowing that our model of trains were running flawlessly in Edmonton, or Winnipeg or Moscow.

Instead we are assured they run in “northern cities”. Copenhagen may well be north of us, but it has a maritime climate. The 100% low floor trains currently run in Adelaide, Lyon, Bordeaux, Paris T2, Valenciennes, Rotterdam, Buenos Aires,Madrid, Melbourne, Nice, Murcia, Barcelona, Jerusalem, Le Havre and Grenoble. With the exception of Grenoble, none of these strike me as having a severe continental climate. Is it too much to have the supplier provide a chart showing the winter conditions in a couple of cities running the same equipment for the same run lengths proposed for Ottawa? And could staff then phone those cities to see if the equipment runs in mid-winter?

The last time we had street-cars in Ottawa, they were notorious for breaking down in the snow, which packed underneath them and lifted the vehicle off the tracks, paralyzing the system.

Deep Frozen Storage

We also propose storing our train-sets outdoors. After they have been washed and cleaned, we’ll roll them outside into the minus 40 and leave them for several hours, before sending them out at 6am to collect passengers. I’d be a lot more confident that they would be warm and unfrozen if they were stored indoors, even if the storage yard was just minimally heated to above freezing.

Ottawa storage yard is outdoors, covered from the snow but not heated

Maintenance facility in Catalonia

The characteristic Ottawa foot-stomp

The trains aren’t the only things we are leaving out in the cold. The passengers will be, too.

Unlike the current Transitway system, which has several heated stations (eg, Lincoln Fields, the former Baseline Station, Hurdman, Place D’Orleans) the new surface stations apparently will not have any heated passenger waiting areas.

Earlier in the planning process, I asked city engineers why not. The wait, I was told, was only 3 1/2 minutes for a train. But that’s at rush hour, what about 9.30 Sunday night, there might be a train at Baseline every fifteen minutes? So, the answer went, you get dropped off and might have a ten minute wait, that’s really not long. Dropped off? what if I just walked through the snow for 20 minutes with an 8 year old to get there, and now we have ten or fifteen minutes standing in the cold?

Really, I thought the planning staff had a hard time seeing beyond rush hour commuters and lacked understanding for those who use the system as their primary form of medium and long haul transit, who are thus on the system at all hours of the day and night, when service is not nearly as frequent.

These new surface stations will probably function great at rush hour, when train service really is every 3 or 5 minutes. But outside of rush hour, when trains are less frequent, waits will be longer. And thus far OC Transpo hasn’t guaranteed that all the connecting bus services will run at 5 minute headways, which means there will be lots of passengers waiting for longer periods. The lucky ones will be in unheated stations.

Some of the current transitway stations are little more than a collection of bus shelters. Despite all the pictures of grand glass-enclosed stations trotted out to sell the RTG Confederation scheme, a closer look shows that the stations have miraculously shrunk to a fraction of the size they were proposed as just a few months ago.

Look at Tunney’s, for example. Previous stations enclosed the bus passenger waiting areas on the Holland Avenue side. Then the NCC axed these, as the roof lines violated their precious view lines toward the Claxton Building. Instead, transit users freezing their butts off waiting for the bus will be warmed by their inspirational views of a 60′s office tower.Iconic modernism warms the heart and and feet. Other people waiting for the bus will have modest glass wind and rain shelters, but no heat.

Ironically, the train users which are likely to have the shortest waits get the grand stations, while the bus users with the longer waits get shoved outdoors. I’d love to see our Councillors asking a few questions about why there are no heated waiting areas, the success or failure of the current transitway heated shelters, and maybe even hear from some transit users as how they rate unheated stations. As it is now, I feel Council is sleepwalking into a design choice that is not well understood.

Stairway to Heaven

A number of those unheated stations will have escalators in them. For reasons of economy of space and funds, there will not be two way escalators (one up, one down). Instead, the single escalator will run in the preferred rush hour direction, sometimes up, sometimes down. People won’t be confused by this reversing flow because the stations are so well designed users will just intuitively know whether they should head for the escalator or the manual staircase, which may be in different locations in our new stations.

Our stations will be closed during the wee hours. So those escalators will carry people with snowy boots and collect moisture and salt and grit all day, then shut down at midnight for a six hour nap in the minus 30. At six am someone out on Belfast road will push a button and the escalators will silently begin rolling again. I have repeatedly asked the city engineers planning this system to identify some locations with outdoor escalators in a continental climate, but never got an answer. RTG was no better, simply assuring me that the contract calls for heavy duty escalators and there are penalty clauses of they don’t work. Yeah, fine, but where are there escalators running unheated in a winter like ours? It’s not like we can tear them out later if they don’t work, since we are depending on the volume of passengers they carry (more, apparently, than a manual staircase can) for the stations to work.

I get the feeling that Council is rushing too much on the Confederation Line. It takes time to absorb just what is being offered. Thus far, staff are giving a good sales pitch, pointing out the nifty neat stuff. The glamour. The sizzle.

But I haven’t seen an itemization of what compromises where made to get here. Councillors and the public may still have memories of earlier PR extolling planned features that have in fact disappeared.

It was a bit of a challenge to get citizen and user input at the earlier planning stages, when there were so many options being considered. But now that there is a plan, is it too much to set up various users groups to run through the details? When our Community Association asked to meet with staff to run through the station designs in our neighborhood, we were told that might occur in February, after the contract is signed. You know, when it’s too late.

The tale of the virgin developer, the tiny apartment building, and Christmas presents under the Balsam

From time to time, development applications appear that raise more questions than they answer. The one at 13 Balsam is for me such an application.

The applicant is an Italian small-business owner, a newbie to development. He owns a single lot, upon which he proposes to build a five storey apartment building. It would have an elevator, and all of 8 apartments (4 two bedroom; 4 one bedroom). The ground level would consist of a building lobby and the rest of the ground level would be at-grade parking, presumably closed in a garage.

The application has only this one elevation, no floor plans, no construction details. The planning application is written by Fotenn; architects are Liff and Tolot.

The zoning for the lot is presently 33′ high, ie 3 stories. The application is for a five storey building, plus elevator penthouse, plus roof decks to provide the site’s “open space”.

The limit for building wood frame construction is four stories. This could conceivably be wood frame on top of a poured concrete podium level encompassing the garage. But hybrid buildings like that are rare, presumably for a reason. The proposed building would be between the Z6 condo (four stories, wood) and an approved-but-not-yet-constructed town-house development on Rochester:

I talked to several people in the know, and some developers, including developers of high rises and low rises, and no one thinks the building is economically feasible. The concrete, the elevator, the small number of units to absorb the costs … the most kind comment I got was that it would be “surprising if it were viable”. The other comments would bruise tender feelings.

It is always possible that the owner is proposing something without knowing his costs. But surely his planners and architect would be alerting him to the risks.

Of course, there may be an entirely different agenda afloat. All that follows is pure speculation, but here goes:

the site is small and innocuous, unlikely to draw a close look
the proposed building may strike some as so unlikely to get built, why worry about the rezoning
but the planners are the big guns, Fotenn, who also represent Fanto, developer of the nearby UNO townhouses
and the architects are the same ones who designed UNO townhouses, an approved development at the corner of Rochester and Balsam (left, in the streetscape pic above)
and the Fanto application originally was for a 7 and 9 storey apartment buildings that was turned down by the city amidst much objection that the area was to remain low rise intensification
the UNO project has, rumour tells me, run into an underground plume of chemical pollution that may necessitate very expensive remediation, including reconstructing part of Rochester Street. I’ve heard the number $1.25 million tossed about
and said large additional expense may make a town-house development unviable.

So, if a creative and cynical person [who shall remain nameless] strings it all together, this is what I get:

The developers of a town-house project need to increase revenue, which means more units, which means apartments. But having already been turned down for a rezoning to apartments … they need to demonstrate that things have changed and a rezoning is warranted. The site is already in close proximity to two zoning anomalies, the 18 storey senior’s tower at Rochester/Balsam/Gladstone, and a 1950′s 7 storey apartment on the street behind the site. The recently constructed Z6 condo on Balsam/Booth is four stories, but rezoning permitted five (it proved uneconomic to build five, so a floor was lopped out to make it four).

If Council were to approve yet another apartment, say an innocuous little five storey infill at 13 Balsam, then it becomes that much harder to argue that rezoning the UNO site for apartments, say 7 or 9 stories, is not appropriate or compatible, surrounded as it would be by other high buildings or permissions. In this scenario, 13 Balsam doesn’t have to be build-able, just permitted.

Of course, from a community perspective, preserving some low-rise areas within the city is important. A good liveable city has a balance of low, mid, and high rise zones. But from a developers perspective, rezoning can resurrect a project, restoring lost profits, or create larger profits than otherwise permitted.

As if the above conspiracy theory isn’t enough, there are other forces at work nearby.

If I was a land owner on the north side of the Queensway, seeing the Bayview Carling CDP is heading for massive upzoning on the south side, and that said CDP is next going to focus on the neighbourhood on the north side of the Queensway, I would be wondering if it would be prudent to develop my lot for town-houses or hold on for a bit in the hope of getting apartment zoning.

There are other develop-able sites in the immediate area too, on which town-house proposals seem to be going forward very slowly.

Of course, all this might be the product of an over-wrought imagination afflicted with paranoia, and some developer virgin really will shock the established development industry by building an economical five storey micro-boutique building. ‘Tis the Christmas season, after all, banishing the forces of Darkness, and all.

New Brutalism where least expected

The Somerset Viaduct is a long bridge-like structure that extends from near the Plant Rec complex to Breezehill Ave. Unlike a bridge, the underside isn’t an open space, but is earth fill. Sort of like a dam. Nonetheless, the sides of the road are elevated above the surrounding terrain, and that is what is of interest here.

The viaduct has guardrails on both sides. They consist of horizontal pipes, designed to keep cars from falling off the viaduct. They are of an older, un-crash-tested design, so the city is wary about modifications.

A dozen years back (or maybe two dozen) a private business wanted to break the guardrail for access to its new second floor place of business. The city required them to install some large concrete buttresses at the railing breaks. Here they are:

These concrete things are actually stylish. The tops slope to the gateway, and even the vertical ends at the opening are slanted. Rather closely inspired by the city-built guardrail ends from the early 1980′s:

from google earth

And now, four additional buttresses have been installed by the city, to mark the two openings to the OTrain multi user path that runs at right angles under the viaduct. One opening is to the sloped path; the other to a staircase still under construction.

Both have butt-ugly concrete buttresses Gone are the sloped tops. Gone are the sloped ends. Just plain brutal blocks.

I don’t imagine these are any cheaper to make. But they do scream out “bad design”.

Condomania on Carling: Domicile joins in

Domicile has a proposal winding its way through the bureaucratic maze at City Hall. It’s for a 18 storey condo building on Rochester Street, between the Queensway and Carling Avenue, near Dow’s Lake.

Here’s what the street looks like now:

Domicile owns the lot running from Pamilla Street and Rochester (the intersection in the foreground) all along Rochester to the red brick wall of a 3 1/2 storey low rise. Domicile already has permission to demolish the elderly house in the middle .

Here’s an aerial view of the lot set within the south Dalhousie neighborhood:

The Queensway runs east-west across the top of the picture, and Carling Avenue across the bottom. The big black office tower is the Feds, the Logan building housing NRCan. Preston Square, the popular mixed-use development on Preston, is shown at the top centre-left. Domicile’s lot is just to the left of the Logan black tower, outlined in red. We can zoom in to see it up closer:

Notice the long, low building running parallel to the left side of Domicile’s lot. This is Barry Hobin’s office building, running all the way through from Pamilla to Norman Street. It was so prescient of him to buy a few years ago before the land rush.

The lot is currently zoned for 14.5m, or 5 stories. But that isn’t a hindrance. Domicile is proposing a 18 storey building. It would have 132 condos, 3 “townhouses” facing Pamilla, 113 parking spaces for residents, and another 25 for guests. There would be 1453 sq ft of commercial space facing Rochester, enough for one large or two small storefronts.

Here are two street level views of the proposed tower. It is a big change from Domicile’s usual buildings, which are dominated by brick exterior walls punctuated with individual windows. This appears to be an “all glass” tower. Hobin is the architect. Ottawa Hydro contributes those third-world-ish wooden poles holding up electrical wires. They add character to the ‘hood.

The building is quite severely stepped back in a saw-tooth pattern from the southeast corner to the southwest corner. This exterior pattern is more expensive to build than a square building. I’ve been trying to figure out if this is done to maximize views, but I do notice it lets lots of light onto the lot next door. Which is owned by Domicile’s architect, Barry Hobin. If and when Hobin retires, and develops his lot into another 18 storey tower, it will offer him significant benefit, opening up vistas and letting light in. If I were building on Domicile’s lot, I would give long thought to potential conflict of interest in letting the guy next door design my building, but then I’m probably too cynical and paranoid to boot.

Here’s the street view from Pamilla Street. In the left pic, that Volkswagen is parked in front of Hobin’s building site, with Domicile’s stepped back façade behind. I notice the Domicile building has a projecting flat roof on the top floor, something Hobin also put on the midrise recently constructed by Thiberge on Richmond Road a few doors east of Island Park. *

Here are some aerial and perspective views from different angles. The first is a flat elevation:

Rather more interesting is this one, that adds in several approved or proposed buildings:

Starting from the OTrain on the left in the above pic, notice the diagonal placement of the Arnon towers (positioned that way until the City decides it doesn’t need his front corner for the OTrain or LRT). The artist shows great restraint in putting only two towers on the Dow Motors lot, since there is room (going along the tracks) for at least four. Claridge’s 42-storey Icon tower is shown at the corner of Preston and Carling. This building is getting a redesign, see tomorrows story.

A third building has appeared on the Arnon block that currently holds two mid-rise red-brick office towers (shown in blue) designed by Alistair Ross. I vaguely recall that he had original planning permission for three towers on this site. The front lawns along Carling that belong to the feds are shown holding a parade of towers.

Moving down Rochester, there is an unknown tower, and then Domicile’s proposed tower. In the background, the giant parking lot and former trucking terminal belonging to Arnon, immediately south of the Sakto complex at 333 Preston (Xerox, Adobe, et al) is shown with two towers. I am aware that Arnon is talking to the city about what to put there, including a large retail presence, maybe someone’s grocery empire.

All of the above anticipated towers are roughly in accord of what I know of the City’s thinking on its Carling-Bayview CDP, and certainly also in the mindset of George Dark, who recently held a planning event in the neighbourhood that saw a veritable meteorite shower of high buildings impact onto the neighbourhood.

Most curiously though, is the 18 storey high rise put right on Preston, at Norman. If my memory serves me right, this is currently a large lot holding a two storey office building including the Bank of Nova Scotia. Hmm. Isn’t Sketch-up wonderful?

Finally, here’s a Photo-shopped view from the Arboretum cycle path along Dows Lake. In this view, the forest of condo towers has been thinned down to just Domicile, Claridge, and Mastercraft-Starwood.

_______________________

* for a closer up view of the baseball bill on a condo, see http://www.westsideaction.com/look-up-way-way-up-jerome/

West Side Action

News & views on what's happening on the West Side of downtown Ottawa.

Category Archives: design

Making the wrong arguments to planning committee doesn’t help

Celebration in Florida

Burlington Design Smarts

Confederation Line (iii) – Baby it’s cold inside

The tale of the virgin developer, the tiny apartment building, and Christmas presents under the Balsam

New Brutalism where least expected

Condomania on Carling: Domicile joins in

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