A landmark development for the city — and an architect
For Bruce Kuwabara, the lead architect on Hamilton’s Pier 8 redevelopment, his love for the city and its architecture runs deep
WHEN 10 HE WAS YEARS OLD, Bruce Kuwabara picked two books off a shelf at Hamilton’s Central Library that changed his life.
The first was about the Parthenon and its architect, a sculptor named Phidias.
The second was a much smaller book, titled simply “So You Want to be an Architect.”
“That’s when it started,” said Kuwabara, one of the founding partners of the Toronto firm Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects.
Kuwabara is the lead architect on the winning bid for the redevelopment of Pier 8 on the waterfront. Kuwabara and his team beat three other consortiums in a city-led design competition for the massive nine-block development project, which will see 1,300 condo units rise on the water’s edge, along with commercial buildings,
retail and community spaces.
It’s a landmark development, both for Hamilton and for Kuwabara.
“It’s a very, very important project for me,” he said.
For Kuwabara, the project is an opportunity to transform an entire neighbourhood only blocks away from where he grew up. His parents, who travelled east after being interned during the Second World War, got off the train at Liuna Station after his father spotted a sign that read “labourers wanted.” The Kuwabaras settled on Ferrie Street in a two-storey brick home — a building that Kuwabara describes as resembling a child’s drawing.
Kuwabara’s memories of his childhood home and riding his bike around the bay influenced his vision for Pier 8’s transformation. Though Kuwabara now lives in Toronto with his wife, Victoria Jackman, and his two teenaged children, his deep understanding of Hamilton — both architecturally and geographically — informed his plans for Pier 8.
“They’re going to be new, state-ofthe-art, sustainable buildings — and they’re not going to look like other buildings in Hamilton,” he said. “But we kept talking about trying to keep everybody living on the ground, because that’s the North End — it’s a lot of low bungalows and very small cottages.”
THE PIER 8 SITE itself is unique: originally landfill, the prime piece of waterfront land now sits vacant, almost entirely covered in asphalt. To the east is a gritty industrial landscape, and to the west is the lush green treescape of the Burlington waterfront and Cootes Paradise.
“You get this knife edge between the industrial and the beauty of the natural — and that’s Hamilton. That sort of dichotomy has always been there,” he said.
The competition for the Pier 8 development was stiff. The City of Hamilton shortlisted four different consortiums for Pier 8, each of whom prepared elaborate presentations, designs and even profiles of would-be residents. The city, determined to
The competition for the Pier 8 development was stiff. The City of Hamilton shortlisted four consortiums for Pier 8, each of whom prepared elaborate presentations, designs, and even profiles of would-be residents.
create a waterfront where residents, visitors and retail could coexist, chose the winner in a top-secret process (the makeup of the 10-person selection team was confidential to prevent them from being influenced).
From the beginning, Kuwabara’s design stood out as the most architecturally striking. Each of the 20 individual buildings in the development are designed to stand on their own but still operate as a cohesive whole. They’re meant to appear somewhat nautical since, as Kuwabara points out, about 270 degrees of the site are surrounded by water.
“The buildings should not look like they’re midtown — they should look like they’re yearning to be out on the water,” he said.
Kuwabara’s design team incorporated an innovative design for the city-required green space, called “the Zipper,” a greenway slicing through the site to connect with other pedestrian walkways and courtyards.
“We have a lot of fun when we’re designing things,” he said. “When we saw it, it was like an allegory of nature coming back into this asphalt surface and ripping itself open. There’s a kind of fertility that gets expressed in the zipper.”
KUWABARA CREDITS his fascination with the relationship between Hamilton’s natural world and architecture to John Lyle, the Hamilton architect who designed the High Level bridge, the Central Presbyterian Church and the Gage Park Fountain. Lyle, who grew up in Hamilton, went to France to study architecture and then returned to the city to design some of its most iconic architectural features.
“He was an architect who had been classically trained in Europe who came home to Canada, who was trying to adapt the principles of architecture that he had learned to the geography of Hamilton,” he said. “All of his projects connected the water, the land, the escarpment and the sky.”
Kuwabara points to the pylons on the High Level Bridge as an example of Lyle’s interplay between geography and architecture: the pylons are so tall because they’re meant to draw your eye up to the escarpment in the distance.
It’s hard not to notice the parallels between Lyle and Kuwabara — both of whom grew up in Hamilton, left the city to study architecture and then returned to their hometowns to create iconic buildings.
Kuwabara’s past projects include the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the James Stewart Centre for Mathematics at McMaster, as well as the awardwinning National Ballet School and the renovated Gardiner Museum in Toronto.
In 2011, Kuwabara was made an Officer of the Order of Canada “for his contributions, as an architect, to our built landscape and for his commitment to professional excellence.” He is the recipient of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medal, the highest honour the institution can bestow.
Despite his years of experience, Kuwabara was insistent that due to the scope of the project, the Pier 8 design should be a collaborative process. He enlisted the help of three other architecture firms: Omar Gandhi Architect Inc., gh3* and Superkül.
As they worked on the design, Kuwabara and his team met every Friday for lunch to share ideas and hone their designs — a process that reminded him of being back in architecture school. Kuwabara likens the process to a rehearsing orchestra: he was the conductor, but everyone on the team had a sense of responsibility to each other and the overarching plan.
“One thing I knew for certain is that it would be virtually impossible for one architect to design all of these blocks and do a really good job. We put a premium on diversity, and differentiation — I don’t want one block to look like the next block,” he said.
“I just think it’s really important that it’s not just one slice of vision — it’s multiple slices of vision. And that’s what makes great cities.”