[someone123]

Well many of the suggested building heights don't adhere to the 1:1 width/height ratio. Ultimately I think those will win out over any guidelines in the report.

I like the guidelines for about 2/3 of new buildings. I think the downtown area needs a large number of small or medium scale infill projects with good urban design that serves more or less just to reinforce what's already there. They give some good examples of buildings like this on Barrington such as an addition above the Sam the Record Man buildings and new buildings for the Birks site.

For Barrington specifically I don't have much of a problem with strict design requirements since the plan is to put incentives in place to go along with them. For other areas it's a bit murkier, and there should also be room for some novel projects and landmark buildings like United Gulf, especially around the waterfront. It would be a mistake to try to turn the whole downtown area into some weird 1910s era Paris/Boston clone, though in practice I doubt this is going to happen when developers are actually putting forward proposals under HRM by Design.