[URBAN NOTE] "Harbourfront’s drab towers go contemporary - but there are still the Three Ugly Sister

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Ashante Infantry wrote about the planned upgrades to these towers. I hope they follow through.

Once maligned as among the worst examples of a concrete curtain dividing Toronto from Lake Ontario, the residences at the Maple Leaf Quay complex have gotten a facelift.

In the last year, the ’80s-built towers at 350 and 390 Queens Quay, just east of Lower Spadina Ave., have been overhauled from drab, puke-coloured edifices to contemporary-looking buildings painted in shades of grey with red accents.

The look is more befitting a skyline rife with newcomers kitted out in glass, steel and eye-catching lightworks. And it’s one of the most noticeable enhancements in the ongoing beautification of Queens Quay, which got a major boost with the unveiling of a new streetscape last spring.

“All of us are a little envious of what’s happening over there; it gives it a real contemporary vibe on a building that was looking really sad,” said Randy Craig, a board member at neighbouring 260 Queens Quay, part of the HarbourPoint trio known as the Three Ugly Sisters for their detested early modernist architecture.

“These are maybe first cousins of those three ugly sisters,” said Les Klein the architect overseeing the Maple Leaf Quay project. Even in infancy, 30 years ago, this family of buildings raised artistic ire.