You nailed my point. The fact that the at grade relationship and public realm is directly comparable is embarrassing. We shouldn’t be building full block or smaller developments comparable to what we consider to be undesirable projects of 50 years ago. The fact you can still build something as shitty as Calgary Place today speaks to the garbage policy framework that guides inner city redevelopment projects.
I really don’t want to be a downer on projects but this shit is beyond unacceptable considering the quality of projects everywhere in the world. Every aspect of this is dogshit 1970s anti-urbanist design hasn’t been acceptable elsewhere for 20-30 years even. It’s a truly oppressive and automobile dependent design for the time it’s completed. It also shows how novice the people reviewing the application were, obviously this was going to be value engineered to death with the 4 allowed revisions into absolute oblivion compared to the renderings. City of Calgary provide more feedback on applications and be harder on design and materials, anyone could have seen this disaster coming if you knew what to look for. If this development application came up in the lower mainland it would have been laughed out of the room at pre-app even in Surrey.
As luck would have it, the hoarding wall came down in the last day or so on the 11th Street side. I snapped these photos this morning. Still not finished, but you can kind of get an idea of what the interface with 11th Street will look like:
Maybe someone needs to do another drone run....
I really hat how that one part of the wall on the 9th Ave side cuts into the plaza in front of the tower