Sebastian White :: Toronto Architecture Soars Higher

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Toronto Architecture Soars Higher

By Sebastian White | July 2004

TORONTO—The late autumn wind whips off Lake Ontario and buffets the sterile canyons of downtown Toronto with a biting chill as a group of rowdy teenagers skateboards in twos and threes around the sunken plaza of the city’s controversial “tabletop” building, the most imaginative new structure to spring up here in decades.

“It’s alright,” one of the boys says coolly, nodding impassively upward toward the new architectural showpiece of the Ontario College of Art and Design campus, before flicking his cigarette into a deserted McCaul Street and jumping back on his skateboard for another cruise around the concrete slab.

You might forgive the kids who play in the shadows of the new Sharp Centre for Design, an almost windowless structure that teeters on multicolored stilts 15 stories above street level, high over an old campus building, if they’re unimpressed or unsure what to make of this bizarre addition to the cityscape. This is Toronto, after all, where endless self-reflection and protracted public uncertainty has greeted civic projects for decades and been such a defining way of life that many residents are ambivalent towards the major architectural transformation taking place in their midst.

Over the next few years, a handful of the most important cultural venues in Toronto will lead the way in the city’s renaissance with ambitious celebrity-architect transformation plans that will boldly expand facilities and dramatically alter the face of the region’s public institutions, most notably the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum, turning the city once dubbed “the ugly duckling of North America,” into an attractive and unique focal point of international building design.

It is the most significant urban makeover Toronto has seen since the 1950s amalgamation that joined the downtown core with its neighboring municipalities and formed a huge “mega-city.” The half-century of frenetic expansion since then has solidified Toronto’s position as the continent’s fifth largest city, but its fast evolution has also raised complex and introspective questions about what constitutes urban greatness and how this city can achieve that seemingly elusive goal.

As Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume once mused, “The international view of Toronto has been that of a pleasant city but not a significant one. Though people have vaguely positive feelings about this city, they don’t see it as important, vital or a place one must visit.”

"There's a clear sense,” he says, “that Toronto needs to re-invent itself to regain its reputation as one of a handful of North American cities worth visiting. Despite our best efforts to revive our flagging fortunes, we're not there yet."

It certainly hasn’t been for a lack of trying. Between 1955 and 1975, the emerging city demolished 28,000 buildings in an effort to shed its stuffy “Little England” image. In the place of smoke stacks, derelict factories, and low-slung Victorian-era offices, hopeful visionaries erected a soaring skyline of modern glass and steel skyscrapers including the CN Tower, the world’s tallest freestanding structure and one of the most recognizable architectural icons.

While the CN, as Toronto’s signature symbol, indelibly altered the cityscape when it was completed in 1976, new buildings being built or revitalized around town are the real newsmakers today, engaging local citizens in healthy debate over the value of public space and the effect of dynamic design on the human experience.

The discourse has been so interesting and taken such a central place in the city’s efforts to gain international prestige and respect writer Mark Kingwell declared recently in Toronto Life magazine, “Outcry about the ROM and AGO designs has been almost more interesting than the buildings themselves. Silent for so long about the aesthetic demerits of their city, Torontonians were not so polite for once.”

One of those new buildings, the commanding Sharp Centre tabletop—alternately described as “a shoe box in the sky,” or a “flying rectangle,”—was designed by Will Alsop, an English architect whose unique style is often called, “maximalist.” Regardless of the nomenclature used to describe the OCAD addition, each fitting for its unusual design, this extraordinary building has given Toronto’s aesthetic appeal an edge and perhaps more significantly, has gotten its Grange Park community talking.

In the largely working class residential area, just steps from Toronto’s commercial heart, detractors contend the tabletop is excessively showy and doesn’t fit into the fabric of the neighborhood. It may look like a hastily designed and fanciful flourish on the skyline, but according to architect Alsop, “OCAD wasn’t just a whim.” The bold structure “came from talking to the students, faculty, the people in the area, to find out what they wanted,” he says.

Debate over the building’s merit has filled countless column-inches of Op-Ed space and has surfaced all over the Internet, where one web site bills the OCAD pavilion as one of the ugliest structures in the world. Alsop, also opting to describe his futuristic-style building in superlatives, prefers to call it simply, “unprecedented.”

Next door, native son Frank Gehry is busy at work on a $195 million (CAD) top-down transformation for the Art Gallery of Ontario, a project that will also go a long way toward updating the feel of this constantly changing city, if the debate over its construction ever dies down enough to allow the project to actually be completed.

Renowned for his inventive style and brazenly sophisticated application of shiny metals, Gehry’s work will add a sweeping glass and titanium façade to the building; boosters hope it will radically enliven Toronto’s already vibrant arts community. But make no mistake: this project won’t be another Bilbao or even another signature building for Gehry.

“It’s a bit much,” the architect himself points out, “to assume that I will remodel a building that has already been remodeled before and that will change Toronto.”

The AGO building campaign has broken from Toronto’s tradition of run-of-the-mill big-city architecture—the downtown core is largely dominated by boxy office towers and characterless apartment buildings—and it, too, has managed to spark fiery controversy among locals.

“People in the community are already lining up to hate that building,” Alsop says of Gehry’s larger-than-life addition for the AGO, which is primed to upstage a residential streetscape of low-rise apartments (which, it’s worth noting, is a feat also accomplished by Alsop’s colorful tabletop).

Like the AGO, the natural history-oriented Royal Ontario Museum further uptown is also placing its bets on celebrity architecture to rejuvenate an aging image and boost attendance with its “Renaissance ROM” plans. When it is completed, the fresh-faced ROM will be a jaw-dropping departure from its prim and proper past and its more staid neighbors on Queen’s Park. The to-be-built Daniel Libeskind-designed “crystal building” of interlocking prisms jutting out over busy Bloor Street eschews conventional architectural forms of boxy redundancy, instead flowing with a dreamlike, fluid design.

Libeskind’s blueprints are intended to create a new kind of architectural transparency that will “embody the spirit of public space as it draws people into the Museum without them even having to cross the threshold,” according to museum reports.

But not everyone is convinced of the transformative power of his striking design.

R.M. Vaughan, a Canadian poet, calls the ROM’s transformation and simultaneous construction projects a “race to see who can erect the largest hunk of monster-truck architecture.”

Indeed, much of the public seems to be looking at Toronto’s renaissance in precisely that self-conscious light. As construction begins on these and other buildings, locals are left asking tough questions about plans for the New Toronto. Just how far-reaching will the effects of these groundbreaking and very expensive projects be? Will they really alter the landscape both aesthetically and psychologically as their promoters claim? Can they live up to the architects’ intentions of actually altering the ways in which residents interact with each other in a city already admired for its lively neighborhoods?

If you believe the spin in financial solicitations from the ROM, one would think so.

“The fate of the ROM and Toronto are parallel in many ways,” the museum’s marketing materials tell prospective donors. “Both have reached points where the status quo is no longer an option and failure to fully realize potential means languishing in decline.”

Whether preeminent architects and their unbelievable designs are able to shape Toronto into the “urban paradigm for the twenty-first century” they dream of, will certainly rest on whether local residents buy in to these lofty goals and are willing to take a chance on roughly sketched plans, like those for the AGO, that today seem so abstract and far-fetched they are jokingly being called a “$195 million scribble.”