Every few decades Toronto suddenly remembers it’s a city. It happened at the end of the 19th century, when we built E.J.Lennox’s masterpiece, Old City Hall, and again in the mid-20th 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 21st-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 includesMichael van Valkenburgh and James Corner from the U.S., Adriaan Gueze from Rotterdam andClaude 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.
Posted via email from Markham Real Estate Today with Asif Khan
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