Quote:
Originally Posted by JET
Interesting that buildings that have been around for a couple of hundred years( and need a bit of a fix up) are being torn down to build something that has a best-before-date of fifty years. I'm just sayin'...
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To be honest I had a similar reaction at one point when I was reading about all this.
But I think there is a definite difference. 1st of all, we don't keep every 100 year old building, just (as you said) the interesting ones.
If you look at the Dominion Public Building (the old parts of which are 75 years old) it went through a major addition and upgrade about 40-50 years ago, and then went through significant refurb recently. It is a great example in my mind of a building that is worth continually fixing up even though it is a 20th century and therefore not "old" building.
However, there is nothing especially interesting about the RBC building, and I wouldn't be sad to see it go. It's just a building, and like many bland structures they eventually come down. I will admit that I do think that in many other cities with "normal" development pacings that this would instead retire to being low rent Class B space, but Halifax isn't normal, and given that people fight tooth and nail to keep sites from having tall buildings, it is likely easier here to just knock it down and build on the same site.
As much as I won't be sad to see the RBC building go, I am not quite so much in favour of the BMO building going. I actually like that one, and it actually has some reasonable quality building materials to it.