Matthew Har­ris – blogTO​.com

Per­haps you’ve heard Nou­velle Vague’s “Dance With Me” being used in radio ads for a new condo devel­op­ment: Chaz on Charles. Launch­ing a condo project in the mid­dle of real estate down­swing is prob­a­bly not the wis­est idea. But unlike other condo projects, this one does not appear to be threat­en­ing her­itage. The build­ing that is cur­rently there – 45 Charles Street East – is a non­de­script con­crete office build­ing. Even the city does not care that 45 Charles Street East is being torn down. It’s one of those con­crete build­ings that’s a blight on the Toronto land­scape. Or is it?

Toron­to­ni­ans are often embar­rassed by the amount of con­crete in our city. Viewed as cheap and bland, to many con­tem­po­rary eyes it seems like an ugly reminder of what replaced the quaint Vic­to­rian homes, office build­ings and ware­houses that were torn down in the 60s and 70s to make way for it.

But in these decades, the use of con­crete was con­sid­ered avant-garde, and Toronto was seen as one of the most pro­gres­sive archi­tec­tural cities in the world. Con­crete – a rel­a­tively new mate­r­ial that wasn’t tied down by a his­tory of design – seemed like the per­fect build­ing mate­r­ial to posi­tion Toronto as the city of the future. The plas­tic­ity of con­crete allowed for bold forms and new shapes. And it gave us two of our city icons: the CN Tower and New City Hall.

The com­pe­ti­tion for a New City Hall gen­er­ated unprece­dented inter­na­tional atten­tion from archi­tects and design pro­pos­als poured in. One of the final­ists was from a group of Har­vard archi­tec­tural stu­dents. While the group didn’t win, one of them, Macy DuBois, stayed in the city and helped design some of our best-known con­crete struc­tures. One of the most rec­og­niz­able of these is 45 Charles Street East.

DuBois put many details into the build­ing. In an inter­view pub­lished in Con­crete Toronto (DuBois’s last pub­lic appear­ance was at the book launch), he speaks of the design’s atten­tion to detail. He wanted the con­crete to appear very tex­tured when viewed close up, but for it to lighten when viewed at a dis­tance. This dual tex­ture was sim­i­lar to what had been achieved in some Ital­ian vil­las DuBois had seen. And because it was set in the mid­dle of the block, DuBois knew that most peo­ple would be approach­ing the build­ing from the side, so he set ter­races – a rar­ity for office build­ings – at an angle. As DuBois said, “Being angled to the street is actu­ally more attrac­tive than being parallel.”

Although many peo­ple don’t par­tic­u­larly appre­ci­ate these build­ings now, a sim­i­lar lack of appre­ci­a­tion encour­aged the destruc­tion of Vic­to­rian struc­tures in the 1960s. When Eaton’s was con­sid­er­ing buy­ing and demol­ish­ing Old City Hall in order to build the ini­tial Eaton Cen­tre pro­posal, there were peo­ple who came out in favour of Old City Hall’s destruc­tion, cit­ing its lack of “archi­tec­tural merit.” Now this argu­ment seems impos­si­ble to under­stand. Will future Toron­to­ni­ans bemoan our lack of appre­ci­a­tion for our recent archi­tec­tural past?

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

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