Hats off to a great year for city architecture
Combining beauty with function, these 10 new buildings are welcome additions to Toronto
It’s a good year for any city when a major new cultural institution appears. And so 2014 was an excellent year for Toronto.
The Aga Khan Museum/Ismaili Centre, which opened in September, has redefined the city and enhanced it with spectacular architecture in the process. The museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, is an exquisite stone-clad structure that looms over the Don Valley Parkway, daring commuters not to look. Poetic but hard-edged, it offers both a fortress in the distance and a welcoming embrace.
Beside the museum, Charles Correa’s masterful Ismaili Centre is as connected to the sky above as the ground below. With its slightly off-kilter glass dome and expansive light-filled prayer hall, the Indian architect’s contribution is not just a landmark, but also a statement of faith, religious and civic.
The two buildings are set in a large fully planted garden designed by Beirut-based landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic. He has brought a level of thought and attention to the project unseen in an area of Toronto where asphalt is the landscape material of choice.
In another part of town, the University of Toronto’s Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport reinvents the palace of sweat as a fully urbanized feature. Designed by Vancouver’s Patkau Architects and MacLennan Jaunklans Miller Architects of Toronto, the new facility is a striking addition to the downtown campus. Made of steel and glass, it feels like some giant screen that reveals more than it hides. Have athletics ever been so elegantly presented?
Meanwhile, at the U of T’s Scarborough campus, the Toronto Pan-Am Sports Centre offers another take on jock architecture. As conceived by NORR Architects, the new facility mixes elements of the mall, community centre and indoor theme park. Though it looks a bit like an Ikea store from the outside, indoors it is an arrangement of “streets” and hubs. Transparency keeps things visible and reveals a happy mix of activities; in one corner, climbers clamber up a man-made rock face that rises in a large stairwell. The pools are impressive but not intimidating. It is a place for work as well as fun.
The last thing Toronto needs is another glass tower, but the Delta Hotel on Bremner Blvd. occupies its space on the skyline with elegance and assurance.
Designed by Page + Steele Architects and the IBI Group, the 45storey building offers a variation on a theme that, for all its familiarity, still has much to offer.
At the other end of downtown, the River City condos in the West Don Lands are a powerful reminder that there’s more to residential architecture than the see-through box. These black-clad midrise structures offer a convincing argument for contemporary planned neighbourhoods. Montreal architects Saucier + Perrotte have reinvented the 19th-century model of streets lined with six- to eight-storey buildings. They have retained the scale and proportion of earlier times, but moved past traditional orthogonal geometry to something more complex and engaging.
The most unexpected of this year’s crop has to be 445 King St. E., a box with a glass front that brilliantly reconciles Corktown’s Victorian past with its fast-gentrifying future. Designed by Toronto’s &Co architects, this modest infill project is a beautiful example of how less really is more, and how a fabric building can fulfil its civic duty, be respectful and still manage to excite.
Though hidden in the shadow of the Gardiner Expressway, the new Fort York Visitor Centre marks a turning point for Toronto. This sort of leftover space has acquired new importance as the city madly urbanizes.
Rising out of the low ground beneath the ramparts, the centre is a long, low-slung structure that echoes the horizontality of the site.
The nearby Fort York Library continues the architectural transformation of the conventional library into a communal living room, a continuation of the public realm. Designed by Toronto’s KPMB Architects, this glass-clad branch includes old-fashioned bookshelves and high-tech facilities. It is clean, crisp and efficient, yet comfy and intimate. Sharing space with a park (that has yet to appear) and an unusually attractive condo tower, the library has been an integral part of the neighbourhood since it opened in May.
Finally, let’s not forget the MYC condo development at Yonge and Merton in north Toronto. This 25-floor glass tower, the latest from Toronto’s pre-eminent condo architect, Peter Clewes, is an exquisite exploration of the crystalline. As MYC makes clear, there’s more to transparency than meets the eye. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca