Suburb is the New Urb
For the longest time, Mississauga had been all about sprawl. Look at any point on a map and you can see we’re less a city than a collection of subdivisions and shopping plazas. I think we have more space devoted to parking lots than roads…but I’m getting off topic. Sprawl. As recently as 1995, our city had many tracts of old farmland, so it was nothing for our city council to rezone it for residential and build a few hundred detached homes, add a grocery store somewhere in there, and move on. No condo skyrises, no commercial towers, just backyards and No Exit signs. I think once the city’s population zoomed past 600,000 they realized their plans were no longer sustainable.
So now Mississauga is growing…er, building…up. Every small piece of leftover real estate (ironically, most of it is in what we call our city centre) is now being built into condos. I remember seeing more metal cranes in that part of the city all working at once in the last three years than I’ve ever seen in the rest of the city in all my previous years.
Does a building need a pelvis?
The biggest example of our new love with all things condo, are these two beauties. Officially, they’re designated the Absolute World 1 and 2 but at the time the south tower was unveiled it was immediately dubbed the “Marilyn Monroe” building. Now at the time, this was in 2006, I hated the design. Today, I’m still not a fan. Rotate this 3D model to imagine what you’d see as you drive past it. But, I will have to admit: it is original. And while it may end up architecturally sticking out for a long time (our city really is as flat as a Google Earth map) if it ends up inspiring other buildings around it, we’ll end up with one kickass skyline.
The building was designed by Yansong Ma of MAD Ltd. And just for the record, this is the design I would have liked to see win.
