EVERGREEN’S NEW LIFE
The redeveloped Kiln Building debuts this week by hosting the Future Cities Conference.
If patience is a virtue, Geoff Cape might soon find himself a candidate for canonization. Founder and CEO of Evergreen Brick Works, he has spent nearly two decades struggling to bring new life and purpose to the former industrial site in the Don Valley.
And although years of effort lie ahead, Evergreen is already an established presence — physical, intellectual, social — on the Toronto landscape. As well as being a centre for urban environmentalism, it is a popular event venue and a place to see an exhibition, eat lunch or shop at the Saturday food market.
This week, the Kiln Building will make its debut when it hosts the Future Cities Conference, a clambake set to examine what fresh hell awaits our increasingly urbanized planet and how we might avoid it.
The extraordinary structure, which for now can only be visited on an organized tour, is the largest on the five-hectare site. At the heart of business during its century of operation, the building saw 25 million bricks made there annually. After it shut down in 1984, the massive 1950s pile was abandoned to ravers who partied there and plastered its walls with graffiti.
Now, thanks to a brilliantly innovative intervention by LGA Architectural Partners, the Kiln Building has been transformed into a living museum, conference centre and place of learning. It’s a multipurpose landmark that will itself be as much an object of attention as anything within, whether classrooms, exhibit spaces or the leftover machinery of the brick-making process.
“Evergreen gave us a wonderful opportunity to try new things,” LGA’s Drew Adams says. “They pushed us to take chances. We all learned a lot.”
From the floor up, Adams and his crew faced numerous challenges — physical, technical and bureaucratic. The heritage requirements, for example, verged on the ridiculous. Despite an appalling record of allowing the destruction of countless significant sites and an easy willingness to settle for saving a facade or two, Toronto heritage police insisted that the walls of the Kiln Building be left untouched, inside and out, and all graffiti kept.
Remarkably, Adams managed to maintain every Krylon splotch intact and keep the heap usably warm in the coldest weather. At the same time, LGA figured out how to cope with the 100-year floods that now occur two or three times a decade. The secret lies beneath the polished concrete floor, invisible to even the most attentive visitors. It begins with hundreds of “displacement forms” that reduce the amount of concrete needed to raise the floor level 30 centimetres and create spaces where floodwaters collect and can be pumped out if necessary. This is also where geothermal pipes bring warmth from the ground, heat the floor and, through it, the building.
“Our aim,” Adams points out, “was to use as light a touch as possible. The heating and cooling system is 97 per cent carbon neutral.”
“For us,” Cape says, “the rationale is to reduce day-today operating costs and focus on long-term efficiency. This is the space we always imagined was possible and even more. It’s part art gallery, part science centre. As a society, we construct buildings for the things we consider important — museums, hospitals, schools and so on — but we haven’t built places that address citybuilding, which is the most important thing we do today.”
Cape is right. Though our universities and colleges churn out armies of urban planners and architects, the skills and principles they are taught have not led to a coherent, let alone intelligent approach to cities. In Toronto, where many buildings seem at odds with each other, the approval process is more about ticking boxes than implementing a shared vision of the city’s future.
Above all, Evergreen has used the Kiln Building to practise what it preaches. This is a structure that accepts nature, not in its Disneyfied version, but for what it is, destructive and delightful in equal measure.
It does all it can to slow climate change both by reusing the energy embedded in the original building and drastically reducing emissions.
“The client makes a really big difference,” Adams notes. Therein lies one of the thorniest issues facing planners and architects today. Typically, they are paid to get in and out of a project as cheaply and quickly as possible. Evergreen did the right thing; it gave LGA room to explore new materials and methods of dealing with the environmental crisis we prefer to ignore. As the building reminds us, that’s no longer an option.