Toronto's famous cube house destined to be put on ice

financialpost.com:

Jeff Brown wakes up early summer mornings, grabs his paddle board and heads off into the waves in front of his waterfront home in Collingwood, Ont. It is a cherished ritual, and among the perks of being semi-retired at age 64 and residing in a community of like-minded go-getters whose working days tend to be mostly behind them, so they don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about what they once did to earn a living.

The accountant-turned-entrepreneur is no exception. But catch Brown in a reflective mood and he might just dig out a cardboard box full of keepsakes from a “previous life,” showcasing his greatest commercial failure as a businessperson.

“The cubes were a unique play,” he said. The cubes, depending upon one’s perspective, are a Toronto housing icon, or, if you please, ugly, elevated, box-shaped hunks of junk. What is beyond aesthetic debate is the famous structure at 1 Sumach St. is in mortal peril of being demolished to make way for a 30-plus storey, mixed-use condominium.

Brown and Ben Kutner, a senior marketing executive-turned-cube-visionary who the accountant met while both worked at Cineplex Inc., built the cubes in 1996 on a shoestring budget. They were underwritten by a conviction that the Dutch-inspired live-work concept, set on a peculiarly shaped patch of land in an unloved corner of the city, would spark a housing revolution and, in a perfect world, make the partners, and their firm Unitri Technologies Inc., a pile of money.

Instead, the cubes flopped following an initial rush of media attention, and are now regarded as a must-see oddity among architecture nerds, a landmark to passing motorists, a home to their sole, decades-long tenant, a heritage-listed address by the city and, fatefully, an