Text: Christopher Hume

Source: The Toronto Star, 12.01.09

A warning to all those who complain nothing ever happens on Toronto’s waterfront: Moshe Safdie is designing a major mixed-use complex for a site on Queens Quay, just east of Sherbourne St.

Safdie is the Montreal-trained architect whose first waterfront project, Habitat at Expo 67, made him world-famous.

There’s no guarantee this project will gain equal renown, but there’s no question it’s the best thing to have been proposed for Toronto’s long-neglected harbour lands in decades.

This site is as desolate as any east of Yonge St., south of the Gardiner Expressway. However, as Safdie was quick to point out at a news conference Monday, "It’s a no man’s land right now, but it’s close to the city and well connected."

"This will be one of the city’s most desirable neighbourhoods," declared John Campbell, president of Waterfront Toronto, the agency created in 2001 to oversee docklands regeneration.

The $200 million building will include condos, offices and retail outlets, as well as a daycare centre. At least 5 per cent of the condos are to be three-bedroom units. Residents will also enjoy numerous "gardens in the sky," which constitute the conceptual basis of the project, Safdie explains.

"My objective," he says simply, "is to create a wonderful environment to live in."

Safdie’s plan calls for a 36-storey condo tower atop a 10-floor podium, mostly glass, that would face Lake Ontario. The complex will also form the eastern edge of Sherbourne Park, now under construction.

Because it sits on the north side of Queens Quay, the new development will have no direct water access. But as Safdie notes, above the 10th floor, residents will have views of the lake.

Architecturally, the most striking feature is a series of "terraces" that cascade diagonally down the west and east facades. These terraces are made of concrete; the recessed parts in between, of glass. Undoubtedly, this will make the building a landmark on the Toronto skyline, if not an icon.

Most important, perhaps, the project shows that, despite widespread cynicism, the regeneration of the waterfront is unfolding as it should. The developer, Great Gulf, won the right to purchase the land from Waterfront Toronto in return for promising a sustainable mixed-use building that meets the highest design standard. Toronto council is to debate the sale of the city-owned part of the land on Tuesday.

Of course, there will be much debate, especially about the architectural element. But in choosing Safdie, Great Gulf has signalled its willingness to move beyond the spirit of Toronto waterfronts past and enter into the spirit of waterfronts future.

One of the last remaining operations on this site was a collection of boxcars arranged to form a restaurant. In other words, it was not the kind of area that inspired much interest, let alone investment.

But even before Monday’s announcement, change had begun on the waterfront. An office building is nearing completion at the foot of Jarvis St., and directly east, work has begun on a new campus for George Brown College.

And as Campbell makes clear, this is "the first private-sector development in the new waterfront neighbourhood of East Bayfront."

Safdie, who lives in Boston and teaches at Harvard, has worked around the world. His credits include the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Vancouver Library, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Marina Bay Sands in Singapore and Terminal One at Pearson Airport. This is his first job in downtown Toronto.

Though his scheme, which faces the lake, assumes the Gardiner Expressway will continue to stand, Safdie has arranged things so that the building could a have a second (north) entrance if necessary. No one has asked his opinion, but he doesn’t hide the fact he thinks the expressway should come down.

"I think that’s what they should do," he says.

Design: Cindy Rendely Architexture

Image Credits: Cindy Rendely Architexture

This newest addition to contemporary residential architecture in Toronto is clean and simple. Although there is nothing overly revolutionary about the house, it contrasts elegantly with its neighbours and opens beautifully into the landscape. The overall form appears as stepped arrangement of volumes with a rich material palette.

The house was created as a multigenerational home for grandparents, parents and three children, as well as for a caregiver and her husband. The objective was to build a house that would take advantage of its spectacular ravine setting; comfortably provide community and privacy as desired; and reflect the contemporary attitude and lifestyle of its owners.

A U-shaped plan of three volumes, the house wraps around an outdoor courtyard /dining room and a wide, feature staircase that unfolds into the back garden. The main wing of metal and stone houses the family of five and the caregiver suite. It hovers on top of a horizontal, stone volume that establishes an entrance hall at the front of the house. This is nestled beside a small, single storey brick volume that contains the garage and a small, ground floor apartment for the grandparents. The plan provides each family with privacy, but fully glazed walls and strategically placed entrances and amenities bring them together, ensuring that everyone participates in the daily activities of the household.

Source: The Toronto Star, 04.18.09

There’s nothing unusual about the appearance of a new tower in Toronto, but a new office tower is something different. After a break of almost a decade, the corporate skyscraper is back.

Suddenly it seems the slick facades of highrise corporatism are everywhere. Just weeks ago it was the opening of the Bay-Adelaide Centre, a tall glass box wrapped around the remnants of an office block from an earlier era.

Now it’s the RBC Centre. Occupying the southwest corner of Wellington and Simcoe Sts., this huge project includes a hotel and condo component, as well as an office tower. The latter, which also opened recently, faces onto the intersection. Though the Residence at Ritz-Carlton remains under construction directly to the west, the corporate piece is complete.

Designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox of New York with Bregman and Hamann of Toronto, this is a complex of rare elegance. It also happens to be a thoroughly urban addition to the streetscape and the skyline, one of those exceptional developments that work both as a landmark and a place to be.

From a distance, the tower is all transparency, a glass-clad lantern. The architects have avoided the threat of post-traumatic tower disorder by subtly manipulating the façades. They become a series of planes that behave independently of the expected geometry of the building. A few metres above grade, for example, the east façade starts the slant inward. As it rises the full height of the tower, 43 storeys, that same front emerges as a separate architectural element in its own right.

The surprisingly modest entrance leads to one of the most striking lobbies this city has ever seen. Minimal to the point of sparseness, the space is divided by a row of large bulkheads that divide banks of elevators. The furniture, a pair of black stone benches and a matching security desk, is so cool it squeaks. The space achieves a kind of perfection.

Outside, the block-long development brings a new level of activity and life to long-suffering Wellington. Keep in mind that west of Simcoe, it is a street of loading docks, back doors and garage entrances, all necessary, but hardly the stuff of great urban moments.

That didn’t stop the designers from engaging Wellington directly. The most dramatic feature is a 10-storey podium, glass and steel, that comes out to the sidewalk. Though unfinished, the street-level element of the hotel/condo next door is already attracting attention. Above, an enormous cornice, about five or six storeys high, reaches out from the building, a gesture as protective as it is eye-catching.

Not so long ago, a bank tower such as this would have been inconceivable anywhere west of University Ave., especially on Wellington. There are other big structures in the neighbourhood – the CBC Broadcast Centre to the west and Metro Hall to the north – but no one would have expected to find them in the Financial District. Historically, that’s where a project such as RBC would have gone.

It says much about the growing maturity of our city that bankers are now comfortable building on land outside their traditional Valhalla at King and Bay. And nobody could argue a tower of such quality isn’t infinitely preferable to the parking lot it replaced.

The third new highrise is the Telus Tower on Bremner Blvd. at York St. Again, it’s on the wrong side of the tracks, but on a site that makes a lot of sense.

For a community awash in residential construction, the advent of three distinctly nondomestic towers reminds us that the city is more than just a place to live and play. The condo-ization of every neighbourhood in Toronto, including the Financial District itself, comes at a cost, namely that of diversity. Though it’s unlikely anyone will thank the Royal Bank, we should be happy it decided to stay downtown. In recent decades, financial institutions have been quietly heading for the asphalt hills of Mississauga.

The fact that that has started to change says something important about where Toronto’s going. Even before Richard Florida and the Gospel of the Creative Class came along, it was clear that cities represented the future.

The fact that the RBC was also designed to meet LEED green building Gold certification – meaningless in a suburban setting – also speaks volumes about the goals of contemporary corporate architecture. Informed by the need for urbanity, the KPF scheme represents a genuine act of city-building, not just another tower.

And so one more gap in the urban fabric has been filled, a tear repaired. Though Toronto remains a work in progress, the RBC Centre brings it one step closer to completion. Other buildings will have to go so that work can continue, but this new complex is a keeper. It deserves to stay.

Design: KPMB Architects

Image Credits: Tom Arban

The Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall, which opened its doors this past Friday, boasts 1,137 new seats under stunning, undulating ribbons of oak, adding a new Toronto venue "of international importance" to KPMB’s portfolio. Acoustical panels and lights are detailed into the split of these waves, creating a path for both sound and experience. 

Design: Stantec Architecture Ltd.

Image Credits: Stantec Architecture Ltd.

Once the home to McGregor Sock Factory, this heritage building was first built in 1905 and was recently repurposed as a home for Stantec’s own multi-disciplinary office space. The warmth of the space is achieved throughout by using reclaimed 500-year-old white pine timbers and revealing much of the building’s original structure.  

An incision was made through the space to create a two storey volume which connects the two levels via a public zone featuring shared reception, meeting rooms, design library and café spaces. An internal stair connects the space and encourages casual interaction and collaboration among multi-disciplinary professionals.

The open studio environment features a low-profile, open and flexible layout that maximizes daylight and views for all occupants. A raised floor system offers underfloor air, power and data distribution, exposing the beautiful wood structure to emphasize the industrial heritage of the building.

Design: Moriyama & Teshima Architects

Image Credits: Tom Arban Photography

The design of this Prayer Hall combines two existing, triangular-shaped stepped lecture halls into a new, single level, symmetrical, east oriented room for two hundred worshippers. The space is spiritually evocative and uses light and material to accommodate those faiths that worship iconographically and those that worship iconoclastically.

The expression of light is the distinguishing feature of the space. Framed in Venetian Plaster is 80 square meters of glowing, back lit ceiling and front wall. The onyx is panelized using sacred numerology and geometries to create a ceiling mosaic that subtly references the religious structure of all faiths. The gesture is minimal with a custom support ceiling system and hidden alcoves on the front wall which, when open, reveal the icons of four of the most active faith groups on campus.

Design: Kohn Shnier Architects

Image Credits: Tom Arban Photography

The rectangular building hews closely to the street on its dense inner-suburban site, and the spectacular honeycomb facade, looking out over the schoolyard, communicates with passing traffic.

Will Alsop, the architect behind OCAD’s audacious Sharp Centre for Design and the remarkable WESTside Lofts sales centre, has just been announced to join the faculty at Toronto’s Ryerson University architecture department.

"Let’s put it this way," says the unconventional architect/painter, "if Harvard were to ask me to do something, I’d probably say no."

As the man who always cheers for the underdog explains it, "I like the graduate department at Ryerson because it’s fairly young, it’s only been around for a few years, and I like things that are new."

Read Christopher Hume’s Toronto Star article here.

Location: Heath Street West and Dunvegan Road 

Location: Winnett Avenue and Durham Avenue 

Source: Torontoist, 06.12.09 

Image Credits: Miles Storey

This morning marked the official opening of the Simcoe WaveDeck, the latest milestone in the ambitious central waterfront transformation. In total, four of these curvy, boardwalk-meets-bridge structures will be open by 2012, each at the base of a major waterfront street. The award-winning Spadina WaveDeck opened late last summer, the Rees WaveDeck is on schedule for a launch later this season, and the Parliament WaveDeck is working its way through the design development phase. Aptly named, each WaveDeck is a variation of a multi-layered, undulating ribbon of wood, rising as tall as six feet above the ground and dipping to almost skim the water’s surface.

West 8, the Rotterdam design and architecture firm behind the project, along with Toronto-based du Toit Allsopp Hiller, were awarded this commission in 2006, after winning an international design competition. There are two major objectives to this design initiative, which the WaveDecks so clearly illustrate [PDF]. The first is to introduce continuity along the water’s edge, on both architectural and functional levels. Architectural continuity, in this case, is the iconic language of the wooden curves. Now that two WaveDecks are open to the public, this “consistent design signature” will help Torontonians immediately identify it with the Central Waterfront. Alternatively, a basic example of functional continuity is the ability to walk along the water’s edge from one end to the other.

Traces of commercial activity that once dominated Toronto’s shoreline now act as barriers between pedestrians and the blue water’s edge. Slips, those water-filled spaces cut into the land, were built as part of the Toronto Harbour to facilitate trade from the St. Lawrence Seaway. They were where ships once loaded and unloaded. In total, there are eight heads of slip—Portland, Spadina, Peter, Rees, Simcoe, York, Yonge, and Jarvis—over which the walkable surface area will be expanded. Each segment will be joined together via new and existing walkways to produce a fully connected promenade along the water’s edge, spanning three kilometres from Bathurst Street to Parliament Street.

The second objective introduces specific design projects for each of the eight heads of slip, such as the proposals for the redevelopment of the Jarvis Street slip. These designs will each establish a unique space at the terminus of the respective north-south street and act as a gateway between Queens Quay Boulevard and sparkling Lake Ontario.

In the case of the Simcoe Street slip, the WaveDeck achieves all of the above. The forms, ranging from subtle to dramatic, are inspired by the obvious visual metaphor of the water, but also provide the perceptual serenity that people seek from the water’s edge. Physically, the wave shape satisfies the need for an enveloping interface of systems: the varying slope angles help indicate whether a particular area is intended as a space for chilling, a space for playing, or both. The flexibility of the curves can promote a range of activities such as kayak-launching, speed-walking, bubble-blowing, or any number of other experiences. One of the greatest benefits of this project is that it will connect its users with the activity and opportunity that already exists at the waterfront.