Stop tearing down perfectly good buildings
The Wallace Emerson Community Centre doesn’t look like much when passing it on Dufferin Street, just south of Dupont. Low-slung and grey brick with metal siding, the “front” of the building belies how spectacular it is. Perhaps that’s why there was little effort made to save it from impending demolition, part of the redevelopment of the Galleria mall site.
Most of the attention around the redevelopment was on the loss of the Galleria to the surrounding community, just an aging mall to some but a fourseason neighbourhood hangout to many others. Affordability and, of course, increased density were other issues.
It’s a great shame Wallace Emerson was overlooked, though. The community centre won a 1982 Governor’s General architecture medal for Matsui Baer Vanstone Freeman Architects. Beyond the Dufferin-facing facade, a unique, bridgelike breezeway runs the length of the building, connecting it together. It’s the only visible indication from Dufferin or the mall itself that this is a special place.
The cylindrical breezeway includes a long trellis that allows plants to climb it in the summer, turning it into a green tunnel. The breezeway and trellis footings reach out onto the lawn in one section, blurring the line between structure and park.
Most interesting is how the entire building was built into the sloping landscape. The breezeway looks down into the indoor pool on its south side and the pool’s own windows look out into the park. Breezeway windows run the length of the pool, supplying natural light from above.
The architectural style is perhaps postmodern mixed with some high tech, late modernist elements. There’s really nothing like it.
Like many good things, maintenance of this public facility could be better, so Wallace Emerson looks slightly rundown in places, and the trellis plants aren’t as robust as they could be, but that’s not the building’s fault, it’s what Toronto votes for. The north side of the building is its least appealing, largely a grey brick wall, as if its back is turned, but the designers were responding to conditions: the vast parking lot of the Galleria mall.
The lot is going to be filled in with new buildings, but there was a lost opportunity to avoid waste here. There’s the waste of an award-winning design, but like many modern buildings that aren’t very old, the community centre isn’t on the city’s heritage register, something that might have raised flags earlier and gave it a chance to be saved. A perfectly functional and solid building lasting less than 50 years is obscene.
Waste, too, of the materials and energy that went into building Wallace Emerson in the first place. Back in December, when word began to circulate that the Blue Jays organization was looking to tear down the erstwhile SkyDome, I argued it should be renovated rather than razed, on environmental grounds. This community centre is like a smaller version of the stadium, as its “embodied energy” — the greenhouse gases that were expended building it — would be wasted.
The dowdy north side could have been improved and incorporated into the new development. Instead, the firm Perkins & Will are designing a new one from scratch. New isn’t necessarily better, but, with public buildings, new is often a political prize. Unless they come up with an equally special design, this is a total loss for Toronto.
Like the fight to save the Dominion Foundry in the Canary District, new buildings can coexist with older ones. The lesson here is about changing the ethos so this doesn’t happen again: How can we build new and grow, with minimal needless waste during a climate crisis?
The next test might be St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. A year ago, city council voted unanimously to tear down the city-owned theatre complex and rebuild a state-of-the-art facility after TO Live, the city agency that oversees publicly owned theatres, said it required $42 million in repairs. Even the climate hawks on council didn’t try to stop it, but, for now, TO Live’s proposed $200-million rebuild is on hold due to COVID.
St. Lawrence Centre was one of nearly 900 centennial projects to celebrate Canada’s first 100 years and create public buildings and works to serve the country into its next century. But it has always been in the shadow of its more famous neighbour, despite the dizzying name changes, from O’Keefe to Hummingbird to Sony to, for now, Meridian Hall.
St. Lawrence is a funky hunk of attractive, angular concrete that doesn’t seem as monumental as it really is, meeting the Front Street sidewalk humanely, with a glass wall that lets passersby see what’s going on in the lobby during intermission.
Theatre folks have argued it’s an imperfect venue for contemporary needs. That may very well be true, but there’s no reason a thoughtful renovation can’t transform the 50-yearyoung building to something great. Perhaps not the political prize a completely new building is, but the only responsible choice if Toronto takes climate seriously.