Alex Bozikovic – The Globe and Mail

In the real estate world, mar­ket­ing peo­ple and proud archi­tects occa­sion­ally insist that a build­ing is a work of art. That is some­times true, but archi­tec­ture is not sculp­ture: Mak­ing a good build­ing demands all kinds of good urban wis­dom, tech­ni­cal skills, good money and a good piece of land.

Like­wise, if you start with an inter­est­ing site, you will likely get an inter­est­ing build­ing. A case in point is the prop­erty at 138 St. Helen’s Ave., near Bloor and Lans­downe. It is a rough beauty: a for­mer cold-storage ware­house, with con­t­a­m­i­nated soil, hard against a rail cor­ri­dor, jammed in by houses and a plumbers’ garage.

But it also bor­ders on a park. And that made it attrac­tive to Van­cou­ver devel­op­ers Aragon Prop­er­ties, who are about to mar­ket a build­ing with 90 condo units and 20,000 square feet of office space. The design, by Quad­ran­gle Archi­tects, is a three-dimensional pile of blocks that will look dif­fer­ent from every cor­ner. It reflects some smart city-building and also a mad spirit of invention.

Yes, things are get­ting interesting.

“Toronto devel­op­ers have never had to work that hard for their sites,” says Quadrangle’s Richard Witt, the archi­tect who is lead­ing the project. “And now, sud­denly, they’re going to.” For Mr. Witt, a tal­ented and ambi­tious archi­tect who’s now a prin­ci­pal at Quad­ran­gle, this call from the West Coast rep­re­sents a chal­lenge on sev­eral levels.

He describes the build­ing as “a kinked tower,” but in fact it’s more like three build­ings: two L-shaped blocks, each four storeys tall, arranged to frame a court­yard, and a five-storey bridge across the mid­dle from one to the other. The forces shap­ing those forms are many: rail lines, zon­ing rules, views and, yes, a fair bit of artistry.

Point num­ber one: zon­ing. “The site,” Mr. Witt, explains, “is actu­ally des­ig­nated employ­ment use.” That is to say, com­mer­cial or indus­trial, the type of areas that city hall is fight­ing to pre­serve in the down­town from the march of more prof­itable con­dos. “But it has an exemp­tion in the offi­cial plan which allows for a com­bi­na­tion of res­i­den­tial and employ­ment. And the thing that dove­tails nicely with that is the rail tracks.” To wit: You can’t put apart­ments too close to rail­road tracks, but you can put office and com­mer­cial space. One prob­lem solved.

Point num­ber two: the neigh­bours. Just to the south is a small green space, called Mac­Gre­gor Park, and then a high school; to the north is a dense block of houses, light indus­try, and then Bloor Street and the Lans­downe sub­way sta­tion. The mixed industrial-residential char­ac­ter that has always existed here invites a bold archi­tec­tural response.

The carv­ing of the build­ing into three parts is bold. Fac­ing the park, to the south, one L will con­tain town­houses and apart­ments; to the west and north, the design puts office space against the tracks and its indus­trial neigh­bours. It will not over­whelm the cou­ple of houses that sit on its north­east cor­ner. And the tall part of the build­ing will be in the mid­dle of the site – five thin slabs, spread­ing out slightly at their edges like a hand of cards being shuf­fled. This is com­plex, as is the neighbourhood.

The exte­rior of the build­ing may take things a step fur­ther with an unortho­dox façade treat­ment. “The build­ing is flat, but I didn’t want it to be flat,” says Mr. Witt. “We wanted it to move.” So Quad­ran­gle is design­ing it with a bold dec­o­ra­tive pat­tern of chevrons, made from high-quality Aus­trian fiber cement pan­els. It is gutsy and its suc­cess will lie in the detail­ing, but in con­cept it looks ravishing.

Then there is the big pic­ture: Why do build­ings on this scale? Mr. Witt, a native Ontar­ian who’s worked in sev­eral Euro­pean cities and for the world-leading Fos­ter and Part­ners in Lon­don, has lived with such mod­er­ate and adapt­able build­ings. He sees mid-rise as an inevitable next step for Toronto’s urban form. He is now work­ing with var­i­ous devel­op­ers on pro­pos­als to inten­sify the city’s major streets. “There’s a matur­ing of the city,” Mr. Witt says. “There is a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple who want to live in the city in multi-unit build­ings, but not nec­es­sar­ily in a 40-storey tower. So how do we cre­ate a vari­ety of options for them all?”

This coin­cides with a new push from Toronto’s chief plan­ner, Jen Keesmaat, to rein­force a decade-old pol­icy in favour of mid-size build­ings. Given the intense pop­u­la­tion growth that Toronto is expect­ing – half a mil­lion peo­ple in the next quarter-century – and the equally intense polit­i­cal push­back to large build­ings in low-rise neigh­bour­hoods, it is a given.

So the project, chris­tened Enigma Lofts and set to launch July 6, is in a sense a lab for the future of Toronto hous­ing. That makes sense, for it is a neigh­bour­hood on the cusp; long poor, rel­a­tively dan­ger­ous and resis­tant to gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, it is now fac­ing rapid hipsterification.

“Since we started the project, sud­denly the whole area has got­ten more excit­ing,” Mr. Witt explains. Daniel Faria, one of the city’s lead­ing young art deal­ers, now has his gallery up the block, and Scrap Metal, a pri­vate gallery that is now on the city’s short list of con­tem­po­rary art des­ti­na­tions, has slid into an indus­trial unit around the cor­ner. All this makes the block more attrac­tive to condo-buying res­i­dents, and also for a vari­ety of office uses.

This block is still, make no mis­take, messy: mar­ble and gran­ite work­shops, fish­mon­gers, all kinds of light indus­try, a loft con­verted to con­dos, a few dozen mod­est houses. A decade ago it would never have been the site for a new, high-end, slightly artsy build­ing. But this is Toronto in 2013, and things are cer­tainly not boring.

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Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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