Martha Uniacke Breen | National Post
Yonge and St. Clair’s Imperial Plaza has voluminous penthouses and a breathtaking vista
Builder Joe Brennan stands in the future penthouses at Imperial Plaza, which he will be designing.
The promotional literature for Imperial Plaza, Camrost-Felcorp’s new condo conversion of the Imperial Oil building on St. Clair West, alludes to the TV series Mad Men — and indeed one could easily picture Don Draper and colleagues breezing through the lobby in square-cut suits and fedoras, since the Imperial Oil building is, in its own way, just as much of a period piece as the series. And its history is far more interesting than its uninflected, minimalist limestone-andsteel façade would imply. It’s serendipity that perhaps the city’s finest International Style landmark, completed at the height of the Cold War and so robustly built it could double as a bomb shelter, is being reincarnated as a luxury condo in 2012.
“I think it’s wonderful they’re keeping it as a living building,” says design-builder Joe Brennan, who will be designing the penthouses for the new complex. “The feeling of it, the volumes, Cubist lines, are just fantastic. There’s nothing quite like it in the city.”
For the most part, Camrost-Felcorp plans to preserve the building’s iconic, starkly gridded exterior more or less unaltered, save for the introduction of a rear parking entrance, and replace the glass block of the former mechanical floor with curtain walls to illuminate the new lofts on these levels. And the landscaping will be considerably more aesthetic than the current windswept plaza (one of International Style’s less persuasive ideas).
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