Brantford city council recently voted to demolish three blocks of heritage buildings in the city's downtown. Guest columnist Nigel Terpstra, of Urban Toronto, sent us this post about the situation. Recently, the city of Brantford, Ontario announced its plans to demolish and remove forty-one structures from the south side of Colborne Street, in the heart of its historic downtown.  The structures themselves date from 1850 to 1915 with the section stretching from 115 to 139 Colborne comprising one of the longest surviving collections of pre-confederation buildings in Canada.  They represent a wide variety of architectural styles from the Beaux Arts of The Right House (1870), to the Georgian of The Shannon Building (1867), to the Edwardian of the Dominion House Furnishings Company (1915).  Within that range are also included a number of Renaissance Revival, Second Empire and even Art Deco structures, all of which were created at different times, for different clients with different needs. They could very soon all be reduced to rubble.  

Several weeks ago, the members of Bridging the Design Gap, an informal design charette, posed the question: ‘when is a bridge more than just a bridge?' At what point does a lowly piece of infrastructure reach out and touch people in ways they never thought possible? We asked this in response to a vague proposal the City received for a bridge which will link Concord's CityPlace development with Front Street to the north. The idea of a bridge here is wonderful. It will connect neighborhoods and people and help foster a friendlier and more livable city. The reality however, is that the proposed bridge is a simple box truss. While such a structure fits into the context of the railway lands with relative ease, it is an undeniably underwhelming solution to an opportunity which rarely presents itself. Our charette closed last week and a total of sixteen solutions ranging from simple Microsoft Paint schemes to more advanced work from professional offices, were received. All submissions were given equal treatment as it was clear their designer's faults lay only in their inability to model their designs on the computer, not in their dedication to or passion for the exercise.