Globe and Mail writer John Mays reports that developers have resurrected Stephen Teeple's Gavsevoort boutique hotel and condominium. The formerly cancelled project, now called Picasso on Richmond, is a completely re-mastered version of the Gavsevoort design.

"Everything about the [former] building on Richmond Street West pushed back against the routine," Mr. Mays writes. "The façade of this imaginative 36-story tower was to be jauntily syncopated, with suites dodging out and tucking in as the stack rose. The terraces created every couple of floors by this rhythmic pulse were to be planted with trees, generating a kind of urban forest in the sky. In sharp contrast to the usual all-glazed condo surface, Gansevoort would have been clad in glistening European cement-based panels punctuated by window openings."

After the former owners sold the building's site, the project was cancelled. The new owners, however, hired the same architect to design a different tower for the same site.

Mr. Mays writes:
"The result, called Picasso on Richmond and due to start its 39-story climb into the sky this autumn, is not as unusual and striking as Gansevoort surely would have been. But while they have required their architect to tailor his building to a quite conventional pattern, the developers have fortunately let Mr. Teeple give his project an exterior sculptural treatment that will definitely lift it out of the ordinary.

Instead of being yet another cascade of floor-to-ceiling glass, for example, Picasso on Richmond will face the city with a skin composed of sharply defined opaque boxes, each standing several stories tall and pushing out horizontally from the core. These large extruded oblongs, like the smaller ones in Gansevoort, will be fashioned from white panels of concrete fabric punctuated by window openings."

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