Around the GJA in buildings

 

[caption id="attachment_8991" align="aligncenter" width="490" caption="Click image to go to a Google map of the area"][/caption]

 

 

Great architecture is a continuous wondrous experience.  As a family home this building is great. Buildings that are  built and continue to serve as icons of a communities built heritage are rare. Often over decades renovations and changes are made to suit the needs or simply the whims of current owners.

A building can  lose the majority of its built form over time. When this happens to a greater number of homes than those left in their original built state the fabric of the built environment changes.

How important is built environment visually to a community, - a lot, city planners often mandate and developers will subscribe to the modeling of new buildings to match the built fabric of a community. A recent example is the  Heintzman Place condominium development. This  condominium project  replaced a disused hardware and automotive retail building and the new building is cladded in a brick veneer simply to allow the mass and visual aspect of the buildings to enter into the community visually and with a historical  relationship by use of specific materials  that have been used to build in the area before.

Once in a while a house escapes this fate and its period aesthetically perfect  form is kept over the run of owners, and the decades of facade changes that occurs to most buildings. It is hard to  imagine that that a house in the Junction  looking like anything else but a added too and reworked image of its self.

Not with this house on HANLEY ST & Willard Ave. The house has retained its original cladding materials and elevations judging through material currently on the building. The rear shed may have been added as determined by the connection points and methods used at the intersection of the shed to main body of the house. Probably this was none in the same building materials era as the faux bricking is completely similar between the two masses of the shed and the main house building. 

Instead of reinterpreting the past, buildings that are left in this state create a new future, perhaps unaffected with new  shape, or materials, they are as unique as the thought processes of the original design  that can inspire new designers of buildings.

We’ll never know for sure, why this state happened has but its a great building to view for now while on a walk.

[caption id="attachment_8992" align="alignright" width="353" caption="Click on Image to go to Google maps of the area"][/caption]