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I've found a lot of the buildings in the thread pretty inoffensive, some are pretty weird but for the most part not that bad. The ones that are truly the worst are where the architects have defaced older buildings with some random bullshit to try and be edgy (gently caress you Ghrey you tallentless hack) or where people just jam a bunch of random features together and create a busy, incoherent mess. While looking though a lot of the places others have posted I kept thinking of the junior high I attended way back in '97/'98 and just how bad it still was, even by comparison, as both a building in general and a school. About ~17 years ago I attended John McCrae Senior Public School out in Toronto's east end. Most schools in Toronto's inner suburbs sprang up in the 1950's in the post war boom and are your standard 2-3 story, red brick affairs. John McCrae was built about 30 years after all this and was like nothing else in the city. I don't know what design philosophy it would fall into, it seems to defy categorization, it was just "bad". To get a better idea of how the building was layed out you really need to look at it from above since the bizarre layout makes it hard to get a sense of what's going on otherwise:  The school itself consists of 3 buildsings (called pods) with each one connected to the others by a two story bridge. Why did they build it as 3 seperate buildings instead of 1? Who knows. Why are they connected by bridges instead of normal paths? Well, it's because the entire thing is built 1 story above ground, standing on giant concrete stilts. And the entire thing is made of solid concrete. A giant, floating concrete block. The land this place is built on is partially landfill so I can understand why building a more traditional foundation and basement would've been difficult and costly but I have no idea how or why someone could look at the blueprints for this place and think "Yeah, that'll work!" then build what looks like a cross between a prison and a WW2 era Nazi Atlantic Wall fortification to teach children in. I paid a visit for the first time since I graduated as I needed to visit a nearby hardware store and figured I'd stop by and take a couple pictures. I was suprised to find that they had recently tried touching the place up, which really amounted to putting lipstick on a pig, but it looked better.  They had added in some more trees, added in some more and bigger windows and filled in part of what was parking for the Adult Continuing Education/ESL facility we shared the building with to make a daycare or kindergarden and added in a new playgroud. To get a better idea of what the place looked like when I was last a student here I needed to use Google Streetview to go back a couple years. Below is more what the place looked like until recently:  The trees and burm thing make it a little difficult to see what's really going on. You get a better view from the back:  You could look right through from one side to the other, but the teacher's cars never got snowed on! Most class rooms had just one set of windows (the angled ones you see on the second building). The large row of windows on the bulding to rhe far right is actually the cafeteria and probably the most well lit room in the school. Some rooms though had no windows at eye level. If you look at the second building you'll see a row of skylights on the first level. Those were the only windows in some room, angled just perfectly so that as you sat in there you could only look up into the opposing grey concrete wall and a bit of the sky. Just lovely. Even better is where they kept us at recess and lunch. You may think that with that wide open field surrounding the school that we could go run around and be free, but no. It would've been hard for the teachers to watch all the students and the field backs on to a heavily wooded revene. We also couldn't get too close to the neighbouring elementry school as we would harass the younger kids. We couldn't really use the front lawn as it wasn't big enough and that playground to the bottom of the first picture didn't exist, it was all still parking lot. So where did they have us play? Well, remember how the school is 1 story off the ground?  Yep, they stuck us under the school. Where better to play than in what was basically a parking garage? It wasn't as bad as the picture makes it look; to the right and out of the shot is a newly constructed solid wood fence thats now blocking a lot of natural light and to the left of the picture is some new fencing that devides the "light" from the "dark" parts of the yard. Years ago what is now handicap parking was a half basketball court thing and the fencing was much further over giving us plenty more room to run around. And when it rained we chould just hide under the building to stay dry. The best part though was a phonomon know as "Lake McCrae". The pavement is slightly angeld towards the front of the school where a number of storm drains had been built. Except that years of neglect had left most of them clogged with debris so in the spring when the snows melted and after a heavy storm the playground was prone to flooding. It wasn't deep but a good portion of the area was covered in 2-6 inches of water. Deep enough that if you went running around in it you'd be sopping wet for the rest of the day. The interior of the school wasn't much better. I couldn't find any pictures so instead I took a shot of the overhang of the main enterance to help illustrate what the inside looked like:  That weird icecube tray pattern was what the ceilings looked like in every room on each floor except for the cafeteria and gymnasium. Every so often they'd have a small light set inside one of the squares to try and evenly light things. The interior walls looked identical to the exterior walls (they used the same molds everywhere). As you could imagine trying to hang or attach something to a solid concrete wall is difficult so aside from a splash of Refrigerator White paint there was nothing else in the way of decorations. Oh, and those aircon units you see in some of the windows now - they weren't there back in 1997. Do you know how goddamn hot a concrete box with no ventilation starts to get by mid-June? Today I have no idea what the school functions as. It's still in use but it looks like it houses younger grades now. I can only hope they got a better playground and a much improved interior while they were busy fixing up the exterior. Psychotic Weasel fucked around with this message at 04:44 on May 15, 2015 |
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May 15, 2015 04:40
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:36 |
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Yeah, it's pretty much considered a dead mall but has managed to hold on pretty long. More recent articles indicate the owners planned to revitalize it somehow but who knows how that worked out. Judging by the shadows it's probably midday at the time that picture was taken, so yes, the mall is still doing poorly.
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Jan 5, 2016 04:18
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