Christo­pher Hume – Toronto Star

Every few decades Toronto sud­denly remem­bers it’s a city. It hap­pened at the end of the 19^th cen­tury, when we built E.J.Lennox’s mas­ter­piece, Old City Hall, and again in the mid-20^th cen­tury, when Viljo Revell’s New City Hall, not to men­tion Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Cen­tre, both mod­ern land­marks, arrived.

It’s hap­pen­ing again; only this time, we are remak­ing the city as a 21^st-century high­rise metropolis.

Given Toronto’s his­toric sense of inse­cu­rity, it should come as no sur­prise that we spend so much time ago­niz­ing over our own urban­ity. Until recently, when the flight to sub­ur­bia started to slow down, even reverse, urban­ity wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily some­thing to which we aspired as a city.

Many dis­trusted the very idea. This time around, how­ever, Toronto has embraced city­hood. Lead­ing the way are its archi­tects, who more than any other pro­fes­sional group, for bet­ter or worse, have helped bring us into the future that is now. Given the extra­or­di­nary growth rates here, per­haps that’s not sur­pris­ing. Last year, there were more tow­ers under con­struc­tion in Toronto (132) than any other city on Earth; this year there are more.

Archi­tects in this city have had a lot to keep them busy in recent years. If noth­ing else, the condo boom has kept hun­dreds of prac­ti­tion­ers work­ing day and night.

Then there was the Cul­tural Renais­sance of the early 2000s that brought to Toronto some of the best known archi­tects in the world — Frank Gehry, Will Alsop and Daniel Libe­skind among them.

And so archi­tec­tural cul­ture is alive and well in Toronto. More impor­tant, local archi­tects have evolved to the point where they see their role is not just design­ing struc­tures, but build­ing a city.

Respected real estate con­sul­tant Barry Lyon refers to last few decades as “a Golden Age of growth in Toronto.” He points to the condo boom, the hand­ful of new office tow­ers and schemes such as the South­core finan­cial dis­trict as proof. “There’s a lot more design sen­si­tiv­ity,” Lyon argues. “We’re using land as it were a pre­cious resource.”

Land is a pre­cious resource, of course, though we haven’t always treated it that way. Few under­stand that bet­ter than Bruce Kuwabara, a founder of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blum­berg, one of Toronto’s most respected archi­tec­tural prac­tices. KPMB’s cred­its include One Bed­ford, Fes­ti­val Tower and Maple Leaf Square, all dense urban projects aware of their context.

“As the city is inten­si­fied,” Kuwabara notes, “we need to design the bases of mixed-use devel­op­ments with tall tow­ers in ways that ensure ground floor ani­ma­tion, lively cor­ners, and the for­ma­tion of streets and pub­lic spaces. Even if every tower were an icon for the mar­ket place — and they are not — the respon­si­bil­ity of the base is to inte­grate with the city; that’s where build­ings meet and form the pub­lic domain of the city.”

Archi­tect Peter Clewes of archi­tect­sAl­liance, con­sid­ered by many the pre-eminent condo designer in Toronto, echoes Kuwabara’s thoughts.

“The issue is how build­ings address the street, not height, glass or size of the floor plate. But the plan­ning cul­ture of Toronto is too focused on built form, not the pub­lic realm. As a result we’re start­ing to get a lot of build­ings that look the same. In Toronto, we tend to look at the street as a series of indi­vid­ual build­ings, not a streetscape.”

“Banks do not enliven the cor­ners of the city,” Kuwabara declares. “Large for­mat retail stores totally change the cadence and rhythm of streets. Large win­dows wall­pa­pered with printed images do not replace indi­vid­ual shop fronts. Toronto will never have uni­form streetscapes, but it could still have vibrant streets that are inten­tion­ally designed.

“Every build­ing implies a city and an urban­ism. Den­sity and height should be pro­por­tional to the qual­ity of design of the bases of large mixed use projects. And the city should ensure that the mate­ri­als and details included in the Site Plan Approval are the ones that actu­ally get used.”

Clewes, who designed con­dos such as the Pure Spir­its tower in the Dis­tillery Dis­trict. 18 Yorkville and M27 at the foot of Yonge, can point out bad exam­ples — Lib­erty Vil­lage — and good — the work of Water­front Toronto and the Bloor Yorkville Busi­ness Improve­ment Area, which spear­headed the recent land­scape improve­ments on Bloor St. between Avenue Rd. and Church St.

Speak­ing of land­scape, Toronto has qui­etly brought some of the most dis­tin­guished land­scape archi­tects in the world to town and given them large chunks of the city to remake. That includes Michael van Valken­burgh and James Cor­ner from the U.S., Adri­aan Gueze from Rot­ter­dam and Claude Cormier from Que­bec. They are here thanks to Water­front Toronto, which has also signed deals with devel­op­ers who have hired major inter­na­tional archi­tects such as Moshe Safdie and Cesar Pelli to work in Toronto.

Local firms —RAW Design, Core Archi­tects, Quad­ran­gle, Mont­gomery Sisam, Dia­mond Schmitt, Hariri Pon­tarini — are pro­duc­ing urban-minded work of the high­est qual­ity. Unlike many firms, espe­cially those founded by so-called star­chi­tects, Toronto’s finest have avoided a sig­na­ture style. This is a crit­i­cal point because it demon­strates a will­ing­ness to design projects that take their cues not from some archi­tec­tural ego, but from the facts at hand, in other words, the city itself, context.

Though rarely rec­og­nized, plan­ning is more cru­cial to cre­at­ing a great city than archi­tec­ture. Architecture’s impor­tant, of course, but it’s plan­ning that enables the total to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Given the rel­a­tively weak plan­ning rules in this city (and province), we must rely more on archi­tects to fill this yawn­ing gap. In Toronto, where for decades archi­tects such as Jack Dia­mond have exhorted their fel­low prac­ti­tion­ers to incor­po­rate “good urban man­ners” into their build­ings, the tra­di­tion of con­tex­tu­al­ism goes back a long way.

Still, as the cliché has it, great archi­tec­ture requires great clients. With few excep­tions, Toronto devel­op­ers have yet to mea­sure up. That’s chang­ing, though not as fast as the skyline.

Just ask RAW co-founder Roland Rem Coul­tard. “Our clients are a lot more sen­si­tive to design,” he says. “Before, we had to push them. Now they’re push­ing us. I love it.”

Like it or not, the stars are here to stay

Though local archi­tects haven’t always been happy about it, the stars of their pro­fes­sion have been com­ing to Toronto since the beginning.

Today that means Frank Gehry, who hap­pens to have been born and raised in this city, Will Alsop (Eng­lish) and Daniel Libe­skind (Polish-American), but in ear­lier times it was Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe (German-American), I.M. Pei (Chinese-American) and Edward Durell Stone (Amer­i­can). Before that, there was Car­rere and Hast­ings, a promi­nent New York prac­tice that designed a num­ber of banks in Toronto.

Their con­tri­bu­tions vary, of course, but their pres­ence alone indi­cates that this is a city that can take archi­tec­ture seri­ously. After all, the main rea­son devel­op­ers bring in for­eign prac­ti­tion­ers is a desire for excel­lence, and if not excel­lence, the excite­ment and pres­tige that these names can bring to a project.

The mod­ern age of star­chi­tec­ture began in earnest in 1997 when Gehry’s Guggen­heim Museum opened in Bil­bao, Spain. The extra­or­di­nary titanium-clad struc­ture instantly became the most cel­e­brated build­ing in the world and made Gehry the most sought-after archi­tect of his generation.

Gehry’s Toronto project, the trans­for­ma­tion of the Art Gallery of Ontario, was a reminder of why he is a mas­ter as well as a star. By con­trast, Libeskind”s remake of the Royal Ontario Museum, though dra­matic, is too provoca­tive for many. Around the cor­ner from the AGO, Alsop”s addi­tion to the Ontario Col­lege of Art and Design Uni­ver­sity, with its brightly coloured legs, has been one of the city’s most strik­ing build­ings since it opened in 2005.

Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Cen­tre (1965−69) ranks among his mas­ter­pieces, and Pei’s lumi­nous Com­merce Court com­plex (1974) are archi­tec­tural fix­tures. Orig­i­nally clad in Car­rara mar­ble, Stone’s First Cana­dian Place was recently reskinned in white glass. It has never looked better.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

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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will alsop yonge condo

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