THE INTEGRATION OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE
They were lined up around the corner and all the way down King Street outside Roy Thomson Hall, but not for a symphony concert or visiting soprano. Nearly every seat in the hall one evening in late October was filled to listen to a developer, an architect and a writer/artist talk about a new condo development.
It seems the building boom in Toronto can not only dominate blogs, newspapers and dinner table chat, but can also fill a downtown concert hall on short notice.
The buzz about the collaboration between Toronto’s Allied Properties, Vancouver’s Westbank and Danish architect Bjarke Ingels began when renderings of the King Street West project were released two years ago. Yet many of the people filling Roy Thomson Hall were drawn by Unzipped, the pavilion designed by Ingels for London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2016, recently rebuilt on the future site of the new development to help win over Toronto.
Westbank founder Ian Gillespie began by praising Arthur Erickson’s Roy Thomson Hall, a radical design that became one of the city’s iconic buildings, and describing how he has a similar ambition for KING Toronto.
Gillespie doesn’t focus his company’s many ground-breaking projects, such as Vancouver House in his hometown or the Telus Tower in Calgary, but talks instead about the public art Westbank has commissioned to complement its projects. Projected on the screen were images of Diana Thater’s multicoloured light sculpture on Vancouver’s Shaw Tower, and Zhang Huan’s Rising, the fantastical sculpture in front of Toronto’s Shangri-La Hotel.
Over the years, he says his company has made the “transition from development company to cultural company.” Gillespie spends up to 20 per cent of his time on public art. Projects like KING Toronto blur boundaries, he said: “This piece is both art and architecture.”
Architect Bjarke Ingels followed Gillespie and began by talking about Moshe Safdie’s Habitat apartments in Montreal, probably one of Canada’s most famous modernist buildings.
“Why,” the Danish architect wondered aloud, “didn’t it have a greater impact?”
Ingels dove into explaining his building, from the inspiration he picked up from Safdie’s Habitat, notably in the room-sized “pixels” that make up its structure, to the quest of BIG, his architecture firm, to blend the building with the King Street West neighbourhood and the heritage buildings it will incorporate.
He walked the audience through the street level of KING Toronto, from the cave-like opening on King Street to the new park that will be built on Wellington, indicating where public art — still to be commissioned — will be placed throughout the spaces. “We tried to maintain permeability,” he explained, showing photos of the walls of glass block that will be a major part of the condo complex.
Demonstrating how each living unit can be reconfigured, Ingels described how the evolution of the building’s layout from simple rectangles to a little mountain range dictates the unique character of every unit. He asked a question many condo shoppers have likely asked themselves: “If people are different, why are so many apartments the same?” Douglas Coupland, author of
Generation X, JPod and other novels, and creator of countless public art works, recalled his mother’s skepticism of public art, saying her voice still rings in his head. He ran through his own catalogue of work, inspired by everyday objects like Laurentian pencil crayons, fishing tackle, tires and toy soldiers, and admitted nothing he’s done is ever really finished, since the public creates a personal relationship with art the artist can’t control.
He talked about the light sculpture he created for Westbank’s Telus Tower in Calgary, and after mentioning he’ll be helping select public art for KING Toronto, gave the city a compliment it rarely hears: “Toronto has the best public art system going.”
Before the evening ended with a cluster of young architecture fans converging on the stage to get autographs from Gillespie, Ingels and Coupland, there was a group chat where Ingels echoed Coupland’s thoughts on public art from an architect’s perspective: “The great thing about the city as arena is that the artist can do whatever interesting thing they want, but once you put it out there, the public can change the meaning.”
Gillespie closed by applauding the interest the city has in new developments and heritage preservation, emphasizing how the two meet in KING Toronto.
“This is Toronto’s time,” he told the crowd. “Take it and demand it.”
“This is Toronto’s time. Take it and demand it.” — Ian Gillespie