Toronto: Landscape Architecture Tour

8/30/2007

On my last day in Toronto, I did a whirlwind tour of the waterfront, exploring decades worth of landscape architecture and urban design.  I began by hopping a ferry to the Toronto Islands. 

Originally a constantly shifting natural sand spit, this group of islands (now reinforced with breakwaters and seawalls) forms the outer edge of Toronto Harbor.  Unexpectedly, you can't look out from downtown Toronto and see the wide endless Ontario, like you can in Chicago.  The water is more intimate, with this green horizon enclosing a calm bay.  Out on the islands are a variety of recreational items (get a map here), from a childrens' amusement park to numerous beaches to waterside restaurants...

... to formal gardens,...

... all interwoven with peaceful lagoons.

Bridges connect the many islands, and there are stunning views of the skyline:

The Islands were most aggressively improved in the 1880s, and had already become home to an inn and some cottages.  Over the years, the park has seen a variety of facilities, including the ballpark where Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run and a diving horse attraction.  (Yes, that's diving horse....) The best history capsule I could find on the Islands is here.  In general, they seem to have evolved organically, as I could find no reference to a specific designer, like similar picturesque parks in New York, Chicago, or Minneapolis. I have to say that though the location couldn't be better, the facilities could use a little love: the beach shelters are in pretty poor condition, and there seems to be a general decay amongst the built works -- though the grounds are impeccably litter-free and well-groomed (like the rest of Toronto).

Also out on the islands are a couple of old cottage communities that have now become full-time neighborhoods.  They don't, however, have roads.  Well, they have 8 foot wide roads:

Yes, that is a public street, and the home on the right is facing it.  It's not an alley.  This was one of the more unusual examples of urban form I have seen.  The blocks are 150' wide and accommodate two rows of housing (that width is half a typical city block).  People get around on bike and foot and take the ferry into town for all of their shopping. Here's what passes for a driveway:

 

Next I took the ferry back downtown and walked an interconnected string of boardwalks and parks westerly along the lakefront.  Some of the boardwalks are in rough shape, and some have been redone, like these:

This reminded me a bit of the evolving Hudson River Park in New York (also here in a recent issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine).  The Toronto lakefront promenade zigzags around marinas and old warehouses converted to shopping and restaurant venues.  The city is currently embarking on a huge remake of the entire waterfront.  The plans are ambitious (here's the official city line, and here is a slick site from WATERFRONToronto, the pseudo-public redevelopment agency): essentially a redevelopment of miles of urban shoreline.  WATERFRONToronto has been holding design competitions over the past couple years to create a vision for the entire area. 

One unique new aspect of the waterfront is Ht0.  (Get it? H Tee Oh?)  Opened just this spring, the 4 acre park creates a comfortable meander through grassy circles...

...to a harborside beach.

What?? Swimming in the harbor??!!  Nope.  No swimming, just the sand and umbrella part.  I was there on a Wednesday around 11 and there were certainly folks out catching some rays.  Also unique, I think, are the big angled concrete slabs (on the right in the picture) strategically placed to catch the southern sun over Lake Ontario.  The park is the work of Toronto landscape architects Janet Rosenberg + Associates. I love the umbrellas against the city skiline...  Nice work.  Also, the paving pattern is simple and modern, without cramping your style.  You get to walk where you want, but the "continuous line" found in so much contemporary landscape architecture makes an elegant appearance (here expressed in brick fields that reappear between grass blobs).

A little farther down is the Spadina Quay Wetland, a small restored wetland in the heart of the industrial/recreational waterfront. 

It's a fascinating idea -- making a wetland in a city -- and I was really looking forward to this particular site.  Finished in 1996, it was meant to provide near-shore habitat for fish and their friends, in an area where there isn't much of that left.  The site was dry, so I can't judge the ecology, but the built works were in pretty rough shape: graffiti on the interpretive signs, overgrown trails, broken signage.  As I mentioned above, this is one of those "needs-a-little-love" spots on the waterfront....

 

Just beyond the wetlands is the Toronto Music Garden.  This garden, based on Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Cello (learn here, buy here), designed by landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy (with landscape architects at Toronto Parks), dreamt up by famed cellist Yo-yo Ma, and written about in Landscape Architecture Magazine some years ago, it exists in 6 unique movements.  For me this was all about plantsmanship (plantswomanship?).  Messervy's use of vegetation makes this tiny site seem endless and each spot seem intimate.  Some examples:

The built stuff isn't bad either.  Here's the custom metal arbor (and shadow) at the easternmost entrance:

 

And, sadly, that's all for Toronto.  Sorry no commentary/photography on Daniel Libeskind's new addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (see a picture here), or a tour of the 1970s era Ontario Place, a pleasure palace on some created islands just west of the Music Garden.  Maybe next time...

 

Toronto: TELUSCAPE

8/28/2007

I spent the day out at the Ontario Science Center.  I had been here before, last year, working on an article on the artist Stacy Levy, who installed a work (Lotic Meander) as part of the Center's $40 million "Agents of Change" program which has remade about 30% of the museum's facilities.  (Read the article, from Landscape Architecture Magazine, April 2007, here.)  I am back to write more specifically (also for LAM) about the Center's new outdoor-experiential-playspace / entry-garden / whimsical-what's-it called TELUSCAPE. 

You'll of course have to wait for the article to publish to get the details, but here are a few teaser shots. 

TELUSCAPE has sculptural climbing balls on a rubber sidewalk:

A reverse-curve amphitheatre and wind turbines that power LEDs:

Trees that you can text-message to (Telus -- as in TELUSCAPE -- is a big Canadian cell phone company):

And a fountain you can play like a piano:

TELUSCAPE was designed by EDA Collaborative and Reich+Petch of Toronto.  It opened in September of last year. 

 

Toronto: Downtown Architecture Tour

8/28/2007

Toronto is a surprisingly large city -- not just because I didn't expect a Canadian metropolis of around 8 million (call that south-of-the-border bias); I didn't expect the scale of it.  It feels big, on par with Chicago, and has a variety of downtown architecture also reminiscent of that other city on the lake.  I got into town yesterday afternoon and set out on a little walking tour, aided by an Insight City Guide.  Here's what I saw:

The Ontario College of Art and Design is a unique and precarious building by Will Alsop.

It's a sort of hovering shipping container, perched on pencil-stilts above the original school building.  Alsop is half of the British firm Alsop and Stormer, which had a big hot moment in the sun a few years ago, but doesn't now seem to have a functioning website.... There's a small boring plaza underneath this crazy cantilever, and it is possible to completely forget there's anything overhead.  Then you look up:

OCAD happends to be right around the corner from the Art Gallery of Ontario, which is getting a new addition by native Torontonian Frank Gehry.  Come back in '08 to see that one.

In the center of town is the "new city hall," which was built in 1965 and is sometimes known fondly as the flying saucer.

Designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, the composition has an expansive courtyard as its foreground.  The space is edged by an elevated walkway (which seems to serve no purpose other than providing shade and good spots to take photos of the building).  The plaza, though in simple, single-material, Modern style, is a local gathering place of sorts.

It's a great spot to grab a hot dog and soda from one of the vendors out on Queen Street, and watch the interactions between locals in business attire and boho grunge, and tourists in Asian high fashion and backpacker downdress.

Not far away is the Toronto Dominion Center.  I have never been a huge fan of the International Style (the whole idea of a building that could be plopped anywhere is anathema to me) but it really does work in cities.  The Dominion Center is a complex of buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, completed in the 1960s.  It is simply masterful -- a cluster of rectilinear skyscrapers that sit within and shape an interlocked series of outdoor green spaces. 

The interplay between indoor and outdoor is seamless, and the layered reflections created by the transparent first floors serve to merge the travertine lobbies and locust-shaded garden courts. 

Somehow the more recent additions to the complex don't have the same transparency...the same elegance (Mies is on the left):

Nearby at Brookfield Place (formerly BCE Place), a generally unremarkable office/shopping/food court complex, Santiago Calatrava has made a cathedral out of what could have been just any other interior mall space.

The white columns branch like abstract trees, and interlace overhead like a vegetative canopy.

A major key to the design is that Calatrava broke the facade and extended the Allen Lambert Galleria out onto Bay Street, which draws you into the nondescript building.

I'll be walking the waterfront in a couple days, so stay tuned here for more photos...