Facadist Toronto: Heritage at Face Value
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Facadism is the practice of retaining only the outward layer of a building, usually of heritage significance, while the interiors are demolished to make way for new construction. In Toronto, this has become standard practice, and the number of projects continues to escalate. This thesis questions what facadism attempts to preserve and the motivations behind the movement in two parts. Part one establishes a theoretical background for the phenomenon and argues that facadism is not conservation but instead a deliberate act of demolition as a result of development, perpetuated by modern ideals and policies. Heritage is habitually thought of as imagery rather than for its human contributions. Instead, this thesis argues the understanding of heritage needs to redefine itself to include its social significance, holding histories, a sense of spirit, character, and community. Part two investigates the City of Toronto through a catalogue of facadist projects and a collection of case studies. These stories will situate the phenomenon to the city, recognize nuances of the real world, provide evidence of this practice, and analyze the effects of these projects on the fabric of the city. This thesis aims to contribute to furthering the much-needed discussion and understanding of facadism. Facadism reveals our current approach to heritage and architecture fails to consider its cultural and community impacts, the characteristics that create vibrant human spaces.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".