The ‘it boy’ of Toronto architecture
Alex Josephson’s most public undertaking yet: transforming the Hearn Generating Station into a cultural hub for Luminato
On the morning of a week in which spring arrived grudgingly but suddenly with wings, Alex Josephson sat eating a breakfast of baby octopus gooed in olive oil.
“I like protein,” he shrugged, giving a boyish smile, perched against the boarded-up windows of Bar Raval on College St. A week had passed since a car rammed into the place — the fantastically curvilinear restaurant is possibly the coolest in town — and Josephson, whose studio designed the space, seemed nonplussed.
Fortunately, no one was hurt. As it happens, Josephson’s father was in the bar at the time. “He texted me right away,” he said.
It wouldn’t be the last time dad, a doctor, would come up in conversation with Toronto’s indomitable “It Boy” of architecture.
“It’s my father’s fault!” he exclaimed at one point about the man who continuously dragged him (as well as his brother) to art galleries growing up (“he’s the lifetime member of the AGO”) and introduced him to Egyptology and so on.
It’s ironic then, that years later, when Alex decided to go into architecture, the same father was unimpressed. “My parents were ultimately supportive,” Josephson says, “but my dad basically said to me, ‘It’s like you’ve decided to become an actor.’ ”
Fast-forward to 2016. Besides the accolades the 30-something Josephson has received — he (and his partners) won the recent Emerging Designer Competition at the Design Exchange and was shortlisted at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore — his projects include the Union Station restoration.
Merging his prowess and savoir faire is a project that’s probably his most public undertaking yet. The firm that Josephson founded, Partisans, is commissioned to transform the deactivated Hearn Generating Station, an industrial landmark in Toronto’s Port Lands, into a day-to-night arts centre for Luminato, the giant culture fest, in June.
An idea hatched by outgoing Luminato chief Jorn Weisbrodt, and one to be executed by Josephson and his partners, Pooya Baktash and Jonathan Friedman, the project is big. The Hearn is three times larger than the Tate in London and “significantly larger than the Lincoln Center in New York,” he says.
“The TTC is actually creating new lines” to get to the Hearn, Josephson points out.
Not bad for a man who started his career by drawing a castle for a girl he had a crush on. “When I was a kid, I had a hard time with language, so I communicated with drawing,” Josephson recalls.
Today, he is persuasive talking about the idea of “permanence and impermanence” in architecture.
“Ironically, some of the greatest pieces of architecture have been temporary,” he says, pointing to Burning Man, Woodstock, even old battlefields.
Josephson is one of the great young warriors against the philistinism in a city still sometimes known as Hogtown.
After stints in New York, Los Angeles and Rome, where he spent four years working for acclaimed Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, he’s aiming for the world, but from Toronto.
It’s a funny thing, though: the snakes and ladders of client desire. Josephson tells the story of how he came to design Bar Raval, for instance. Someone in New York had seen images of the super-cool grotto sauna on Georgian Bay designed by Partisans, at that point their most viral project, and told Raval’s chef and owner Grant van Gameren about it and the firm.
“So, we got Raval, a Toronto job, in New York,” Josephson laughs.
And now, onward to an abandoned smokestack. “The Hearn is a temple to our industrial heritage, which then defined prosperity in Ontario,” Josephson says. “These structures should be celebrated, not knocked down.”