A Belly for Architecture

When it comes to Toronto's buildings could the next 10 years be better than the last 10? Could they be any worse?

Sharp Centre for Design (Alsop Architects)

If you’re like me (and I wouldn’t recommend it), you will occasionally find yourself walking around this city thinking of other cities, and shaking your fist, sometimes not even metaphorically, at a building that should have been great, but sucks instead.

It’s not that I think Toronto is a failed attempt at New York or London or Shanghai. This is a great city—and I use the term advisedly. Despite recent Fordian tremors, we get urbanism like few other places on earth, and we weave it into a brand of multiculturalism way more complex and functional than anything Trudeau was likely to have envisioned. There’s no place I’d rather live.

But would it be too much to ask to have a Disney Centre, or a Bird’s Nest, or even a Chrysler Tower?

We almost had all sorts of things, and if you’re a fan of what might have been, I recommend you pick up Unbuilt Toronto, an excellent encyclopedia of all the stuff that never was. (I had a hand in editing this, but receive no royalties, so buy away with confidence that you will be doing me no favours.)

And as bittersweet as it is to read stories of what College Park was meant to be (essentially the Empire State Building), or the grand avenues that almost were, the pain of seeing what isn’t being done as we watch is far more acute.

But Toronto architects are particularly optimistic these days, and not just because they’ve all been making so much damn money on all these condo towers. They think things are getting better all the time.

Could the next 10 years be better than the last 10?

Could they be any worse?

There was a time, albeit brief, when architectural stars shone brightly in Toronto.

City Hall, The TD Centre, Commerce Court West are all examples of the best their architects had to offer. You could say you don’t like Mies Van Der Rohe’s dark starkness or I. M. Pei’s steely simplicity, or maybe that, being so very office-space-friendly, they’ve had too much of an influence on the city’s buildings since then. Whatever you think of them, though, these guys brought their A games to town.

But that was 40 years ago.

When the stars came out again about 10 years ago, things were different. There are books to be made out of the particulars of what happened to the ROM, the AGO, and probably Norman Foster’s Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building at College and University. (It pains me whenever I walk by that almost utterly unremarkable building and think of what he did in London, or Singapore, or even New York.) There were NIMBYists who whittled down the AGO, and poor planning on the architect’s part seems to have been the reason Libeskind’s proposed crystal turned into something more sedimentary.

But whatever the exigencies, if you’re looking for gorgeous icons, these buildings are all disappointments, leaving that era’s only aesthetic standout as Will Allsop’s OCAD building.

A few months ago, Cliff Korman, the “kor” in Kirkor Architects, organized a panel discussion for planners and architects titled Collaborative Planning Strategies and the Art of Negotiation.

As far as Korman’s concerned, one of the big reasons we haven’t been, in his words, hitting home runs recently is that our local architects haven’t been able to navigate their way through all the committees, boards and panels that have to sign off on anything before it gets built.

“It’s become a very, very complex group of problems,” he says. “We have the municipal planning process, planners, ratepayer councils, design review panels, neighbourhood design charettes. You don’t just have a client anymore, you have a huge collaborative effort.”

And it’s not just that there are so many of them; it’s that they all seem to be going in different directions.

“You have councillors who don’t support their planners and planners who don’t trust their councillors, and ratepayers who don’t trust their councillors, and ratepayers who don’t trust their planners,” Korman says.

“If you want to get your quality work respected by your peers by doing higher-end design, you have to be able to project the benefit of that, which is not easy. If you follow every rule, every place, every way, you’d get buildings that all looked the same.”

 

Original design of NY Tower project, Kirkor Architects

He then tells a very sad story about the NY Towers project. It’s been cited as one of this city’s particular failures, a wannabe art deco crap pile—banal towers with designy hats. With individual towers named things like Waldorf, Rockefeller and (heaven forfend) Chrysler, the comparison between what we do here and what they’ve done in the real NY were just too sad.

Kirkor designed those towers, and Korman says that’s not how they were meant to look.

“We designed a gorgeous set of buildings on the 401,” Korman says, “that were tall, sleek and thin. We got the official plan to approve 3.3. density.” And though there was no popular outcry, Korman says the local councillor made it a condition that they make the 35 storey towers 20 storeys, though they didn’t reduce the density approval, which meant the developer was still able to get as much square footage as it had in the original design, which of course it wasn’t going to give up. “We were forced to squish them down to be short and fat.”

This sort of short and fat syndrome, he says, is rampant. And it’s the result, Korman says, of there being too much distance between the original design and everyone else’s concerns. To fix this, he recommends knowing the field, boning up on the strengths and weaknesses of particular councillors, having ready answers to the perennial fears of the citizenry (everyone always thinks new buildings are going to make traffic worse, and those few who don’t will worry about shadows).

The answer? Forget about icons.

Cities grow upwards and outwards according to their particular cultures. For the most part, buildings are built the way they are because they have to be, not because they’re fabulous. The now famous step-back layering of both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Tower were design solutions to municipal rules.

 

Blantyre House

While I’ve been tooling about town shaking my fists, we’ve been building remarkable things all over town. The Distillery District is one example. The Toy Factory’s another. When it comes to this sort of thing, known as adaptive re-use, we’re already masters of the universe. And we’re just getting started on a whole raft of mixed-use buildings, like Kirkor’s Hullmark Centre and World on Yonge, which aren’t gorgeous, but are well situated, well divided and largely well designed. We’re also very, very good at small, urban houses, like Laneway House, Galley House, Lippincott Living or the new Blantyre House, all extraordinary buildings that increase density bit by quietly remarkable bit.

Our skyline has been defined for decades to come by the recent condo boom. But the city we’ll grow old in, the one our grandchildren will be renting killer apartments in, will be defined, as it increasingly is now, by life on the streets, rather than the imaginations of international starchitects.

If you’re a pessimist, you could conclude that all this means we just weren’t meant to have nice things. I think the truth, though, is that we’re destined to be better than nice.

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