Christopher Hume, the Toronto Star’s Urban Affairs and Architecture critic is well-known for sharing is love and disdain for all things Toronto. To give you a taste of his disdain he was quoted by Toronto Life as saying:
“The city has poor planning, lame transit and a brain drain at city hall, and it’s all because Toronto won’t pay for nicer things (or better athletes) and has settled for mediocrity.”
True or not, Hume recently turned his attention to Bliss Condominiums in Liberty Village. We didn’t expect him to be too kind if previous writings about Liberty Village’s were anything to go by:
“Walk along Liberty St. E. these days and one encounters all sorts of architectural mediocrity thrown up by developers without thought to anything beyond maximizing the economic potential of their site.” Toronto Star 1/24/2013
I live in Bliss so I was particularly interested in his thoughts towards Liberty Village’s 4th condo tower (and my home).
Here’s a taste:
“The orientation of the new Liberty Village is based more on the car and the economics of the development industry than on the pedestrian scale of the older structures in the neighbourhood.
Nowhere can this failure of contemporary planning, let alone imagination, be better seen than in the eastern sections of the area such as East Liberty St., which has all the charm of a 1960s North York housing project.”
What do you think? Is he right?
It’s hard to argue that Liberty Village (and downtown Toronto in general) has certainly not reached its potential as far as architecture and design is concerned. It could be so much more. Travel to other cities and you will quickly see why.
I won’t suggest that Hume is wrong. What I will do is focus on why Liberty Village continues to be an incredibly popular choice for people to live. Where else can you live this close to the downtown core, have a variety of dwellings to choose from (condos, lofts and townhomes), have terrific amenities you can walk to and all for a comparatively reasonable price?
You can read the Star article here
If the price is right it will be a great place to live. I personally love the look of the building.