GREENING AN URBAN LANDSCAPE
Public Work is involved in designing public space in rapidly densifying cities, focusing on the quality of human experience in our evolving urban landscapes. KING Toronto challenged us with three fundamental questions: Can a city densify without losing its quality of life and connection to nature? Can the most multi-cultural city in the world find new built expressions of diversity through integrated architectural and botanical form? Can a project’s public realm enhance the porosity and connectivity of the wider historic district and bring vitality to a much larger civic network?
From the start, the project implied a landscape, a new, organic form of mid-rise to counter Toronto’s vertical skyline. The building massing developed by BIG suggests a series of peaks and valleys, creating a ‘soft podium’ grounded on King Street W. Westbank, Allied and BIG then asked Public Work to bring the maximum amount of green to the urban environment, and to add a ‘softening’ vegetal layer for the pixelated architectural form – a ‘living skin’ that could harmonize and support the built form while bringing another layer of differentiation and texture to the block. Here was an opportunity to demonstrate urban living that is more like inhabiting a landscape than a condo.
We approached the landscape and public realm at three scales: the domestic unit, the block, and the district. In the public realm we also emphasized three primary qualities: diversity of textures and atmospheres within a coherent form; leveraging the resilience of the wild through the selection of plants; and, softening the pixel as a complementary gesture.
We sought to create a landscape that works at the scale of the individual (resident on terrace garden, public visitor/ shopper in courtyard) but combines in a collective garden – a green contribution to the district and city skyline – while also addressing the deficit of nature in one of the densest and most vital neighbourhoods in the country.
THE CIVIC GROUND
The courtyard is the social heart of a mid-block connection that facilitates movement through the district and enhances the sense of discovery. Varying from east to west, distinct blue and green spaces reinforce two unique atmospheres, from vibrant retail plaza with dynamic water feature to a contemplative green gathering space featuring the unexpected: mature specimen trees and massive rocks within the urban block. A mineral tapestry defines the courtyard floor. This urban-scaled, terrazzo-like paving, using diverse stone slabs, features a scaleshifting pattern that diffuses from a grid to organic, bringing diverse moments of colour and light and anchoring the glass building to a primordial floor.
THE GLASS AND GREEN FAÇADE
Climbing vines will extend greenery across a cable-mesh system, complementing the glass-block building façade. Seasonally changing green swaths will soften hard edges and bring life to the skin of the building, rooting this luminous mass to the ground. The ‘greening of glass’ will reinforce the whole form as a ‘soft podium,’ offering a new image of nature within the dense city and bringing thousands of seasonally changing textures to the cityscape.
THE TERRACES AND ROOFSCAPE
A collection of 370 individual garden terraces form a tapestry of living textures, a collective roofscape that adds biodiversity to the city. Each private terrace garden contributes to the collective landscape by providing soil volumes to support vines that climb and plants that cascade from terrace planters. The changing vegetal textures of diverse plants soften the peaks, presenting a total landscape composition.