T.O. architect’s visionary legacy at risk
Sherway Gardens appears like a distant, snow-capped mountain range when approached on one of the expressways that meet in a tangle of ramps next to it. Opened in 1971, it was one of Toronto’s first big regional malls and the reason that merchants in Bloor West Village to the northeast invented the concept of a “Business Improvement Area” in order to compete.
Yet by the late 1980s the intersection of the QEW, Gardiner and Hwy. 427 had grown into the beast it is today, obscuring the mall. Like Bloor West Village, Sherway had to do something to get more attention so they commissioned Eberhard Zeidler and his firm to build an addition that would make it more prominent.
The food court Zeidler created atop the new retail space was a soaring, tent-like structure designed in the postmodern style of the era, with glass blocks, hanging plants and rich turquoise and brown colours. Incredible light came through the translucent fabric roof and skylights. Though the “mountains” remain in view from outside, the food court interior was destroyed in a recent renovation to add more generic retail.
A shame, but too typically the fate for Zeidler buildings and civic designs that were both ahead of their time and not yet old enough to be worthy of proper preservation. When he passed away last week at the age of 95, the outpouring of admiration and tributes to the architect and his work came quickly. His buildings defined a very particular era of Toronto, when the city was thinking big and ambitiously forward, so much so that the style of
Glass and steel towers, cool dark brick and oversized condo lobbies proliferate the city, but is there an individual hand that has left the same mark on Toronto today as Zeidler’s did?
— Shawn Micallef
his architecture was futuristic itself.
Zeidler’s mark is all over the city. Ontario Place is an early, large-scale commission. An example of the “high tech” style, the pods and Cinesphere are all exposed beams, pillars and mechanics, a kind of clean, Blade Runner vision of the future.
However, Zeidler’s design was allowed to decline and even decay, and the site’s future has been, and still is, in limbo.
The disrespect began decades ago, with the destruction of the original “forum” amphitheatre, covered in a soaring roof like Sherways and with a theatre-in-the-round set up, replaced by the shedlike amphitheatre.
Of his most publicly beloved creation, Zeidler once said it’s like having “a fantastic Jaguar, and you run it into a ditch.”
He was an architect with grand, city defining plans, some that didn’t come to be. Around the time Ontario Place was moving forward, Zeidler designed Harbour City, a dense housing development for upwards of sixty-thousand people on a series of artificial islands in Toronto Harbour, even bringing on revered urban thinker Jane Jacobs as a supportive consultant, but the plan was ultimately shelved by city council and the province. We could use that housing today.
Zeidler also worked on initial plans in the mid-1970s for the St. Lawrence neighbourhood that would turn a derelict district of industrial railway lands into the dense and successful residential neighbourhood it is today. As Richard White points out in his book, “Planning Toronto: The Planners, The Plans, Their Legacies, 194080,” Zeidler’s vision likely “displayed a little too much modernism” for the city hall committee overseeing the project, though some elements, like a linear Central Park, made it into subsequent designs.
In the early 1980s, as Harbourfront was being created, Zeidler converted the old Terminal Warehouse, built in 1926, into a mix of shops, arts spaces and residences. A sort of retro version of High Tech, he created an atrium on the southern, lake side by exposing the original poured concrete pillars, almost as if the water wore away the building down to its bones. It’s a wonderfully sublime unsung space on our waterfront.
Queen’s Quay Terminal, as it’s known now, is largely intact, but the same cannot be said for Zeidler’s Eaton Centre, a project he again collaborated with Jane Jacobs on. The owner, Cadillac Fairview (who by chance own Sherway Gardens too), has slowly eroded the sleek late-70s design over the years, adding mock storefront along Yonge, removing the elegant and thin, white railings and replacing them with glass, as well as the loss of some of the original lighting and lush planting. The greenhouse-like entrance at Yonge and Dundas, once a cathedral of light and vegetation and commerce, has the charm of a cheaply built aircraft hangar now.
There are even plans to tear down Sick Kids hospital, with its magnificent and whimsical atrium Zeidler designed in the early 1990s.
The era of megaprojects led by one visionary architect is largely over, so it’s hard to point to a designer who so defines Toronto today. Raymond Moriyama comes to mind, with his North York and central libraries, along with Scarborough Civic Centre, but he’s of the same era.
Glass and steel towers, cool dark brick and oversized condo lobbies proliferate the city, but is there an individual hand that has left the same mark on Toronto today as Zeidler’s did?
Zeidler’s buildings defined a very particular era of Toronto, when the city was thinking big and ambitiously forward, so much so that the style of his architecture was futuristic itself