I kindof enjoy it- i want more. a project like this is all about execution-- not so much intent

I've been having this discussion w/ myself and my friend for a few weeks now, & i think this applies. Sometimes the visual context needs to be ignored. If projects continue to adhere to the visual context, the architecture becomes sterile and thus the city. No 'spice.' Sometimes designers need to invent a new context.

glasshole - thats a good one.

And what more would you expect from Aldo Rossi?

You see I smoke two jonts before designing
I smoke two joints after
I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints
Then I design alright.

“This cloud, whatever it is, better not be a dud.”

Has the starchitecture age relegated us to providing an economic commodity with a definitive ROI. In other words, in order for a well known architect to get a lare commision to do a prominant piece of architecture, they are required to create some kind of spectacle. some kind of vegas. i believe it was shown in the snohetta documentary (though I actually haven't watched it) that snohetta was dismissed because they lack an iconic scheme. are these absurd designs driven by a force out of our control? are we ever really entrusted with the reponsibility of creating a piece of OUR architecture? will we ever? have we ever?

just a couple thoughts runnin through my head

if the site is at the edge of the urban fabric, as it appears, and not embedded in it and therefore making a permanent interruption of it, i think this might be ok.

sure, it's kooky. but alsop has done kooky before without much negative impact. the design school in ontario is beguiling, in a good way. this one looks sort of like a beehive - not dissimilar formally from foster's london city hall. assuming the detailing of it will be more sophisticated than a surface graphic like the current rendering, this could be pretty nifty.

if this were in the center of the city, yeah, i'd have a totally different take on it.

diabase, you took the words right out of my mouth... here i'll reiterate my most famous quote from a debate in my theory class during grad school...

"rossi was a hack!!!"

anyways, that article had two of the architectural quotes of the year:

"a playful architectural blob that resembles the molar of a giant Teletubby"

"I like it here and I plan to plague Toronto with my buildings for as long as possible."

Hey, man, cut me some slack. Don't you know I'm dead?

"just envision a cloud drifting over the atlantic and settling gently on the majestic shores of lake ontario."

i think it's ugly, but kind of cool in a way.

if this were a school project presented to a jury, those columns supporting the left side of the building would be the first thing a critic would tear off.

Golly! My mother just brought me the Globe and Mail with this article!

I'm a fan of Alsop, his OCAD project as well. This looks really interesting to me, but I'd like to see bigger photos/plans before we bash him out again :(.

I was stunned by the fact that I really liked OCAD when built (and thought it was ridiculous from the first renderings). I think because I didn't see a way to have the 'idea' of the initial design translated into a real building without being either watered-down or a caricature.
But Alsop's got a particular skill in taking something diagramatic in nature, and executing it without losing that simple, core idea. If he can pull it off with this one, it should be very cool.

that is an amazing skill to have, freq-arch. and he got it done at ocad EVEN WITH some potentially devastating devalue-engineering.

Perhaps irrelevant, but hasn´t the Alsop office recently gone bust/sold for the ump-teenth time??...Not sure about OCAD but there are also maintenance issues with some of his London buildings. I love his use of colour - or let´s say, I love the fact how completely un-afraid he is of the use of colour...Semi-rant over.

I don't dislike the building form itself, think it's fun.

However, I do, once again, question why we let our fellow architects get away with showing a huge sloping plane labeled "Plaza" that is really just an exhausting hike for the poor sunburned people approaching it without shade, wind protection, or a place to sit. Looks cool in renderings, hellish (in most circumstances) when built.

And: my big problem with this project (based solely on the article linked to above and my memory of it being proposed previously for Great Britain): What about context? What about designing buildings specific to the climate of a locale? How would this project being built here devalue the fight the profession is currently engaged in to make ourselves seem relevant to "sustainable" ways of living on the planet?

It reminds me a lot of this discussion we had about the REN building in China and how ridiculous it is to plop the design from one city down into one halfway around the globe. Oh, and look, the same barren sloping "plaza", too! Yippee!

Also, note to glasshole: I'm not talking visual context only, I'm more concerned with the well-known environmental/cultural contextual problems of plopping the same building everywhere on the planet.

So visually, I'm *somewhat* in agreement with your point above. However: I don't think visual context should ever be ignored. It can either be dealt with sympathetically: similar scale, material, etc, the sort of "blending in" that I think you think is boring; or antagonistically, creating an interesting contrast, of which I think the rendering above shows a good example. It is cool to see the blobby cloud "floating" near the very traditional - Neoclassical, Romanesque, I think? - buildings nearby.

wait. this IS the old cloud project in the image, right? i don't think we've seen the toronto proposal yet. at least that's the way i read it.

i would hope that they are going to develop the sloping plaza more once this project lands in toronto. it looks pretty schematic in the rendering.

i've seen a fair number of sloping concrete plazas that i'm quite fond of. if the detailing and landscape work is done well, they can be quite nice spaces. i wouldn't dismiss the type out of hand.

jafidler, I parenthesied "in most circumstances" above for exactly that reason - I feel like there are some good sloping, open plazas out there. That said, even though I know there are some, I can't think of an example.....can you?

I think you're right, Steven, that is the Liverpool cloud rendering - but where did you get the idea of its location on the urban edge of Toronto that you referred to above?

i was sort of conflating that comment with the liverpool image shown and ass-u-me-ing.

lb, i write that because currently there's an effort in detroit to take up the concrete in hart plaza and replace it with grass. hart plaza was originally part of saarinen's master plan for the detroit riverfront and was designed in part by noguchi. i think there's sometimes a feeling that "green parks" are somehow superior to more urban spaces, ie concrete plazas, etc. in any good city, there's really a place for both, and in the case of detroi, i would hate to see a noteworthy urban space dramatically altered for a fresh patch of grass.

Totally agree re: Hart Plaza.