Re: Architects from 70 Countries bidding for Absolute Projec
Enviro, you comment leads perfectly into John Bentley Mays article below, who shares your apprehension about Zeidler. I agree as well.
Design search raises exciting possibilities
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS The Globe and Mail, February 10
I admit I arched an eyebrow upon first hearing about the Absolute skyscraper competition currently under way in Mississauga. If that makes me a typical big-city skeptic about the possibility of any good coming out of suburbia, I'm guilty as charged.
But you have to admit the prospect does sound improbable: a serious search for good high-rise architecture in a part of the world where real estate developers rule in splendour like sultans, untroubled by questions of aesthetics or by their political creatures at city hall, and where the line that always counts most is not the skyline, but the bottom line.
Upon closer inspection, however, I did indeed find out that such a wide-open search for superior residential design is exactly what's happening in Mississauga, with provocative and even fascinating results. The six architects who have made it past the post and into the final round -- a winner will be announced in March -- include some weighing in from the most advanced edge of contemporary skyscraper design.
Organized by Toronto urban designer Antonio Gómez-Palacio for Fernbrook Homes and Cityzen Development Group, co-developers of the Absolute site, the international competition attracted a mini-avalanche of 92 submissions from architectural firms in 70 countries.
Their challenge was to come up with a landmark residential tower scheme, 50 to 60 storeys tall, that will make a loud, but beautiful, architectural bang at the important corner of Hurontario Street and Burnhamthorpe Road, in central Mississauga. (Three shorter buildings, designed by the Toronto firm Burka Varacalli Architects, are near completion or under way on the corner site of about 10 acres; a fourth short one is planned to go in beside the competition tower.)
Of the entries in the final round, the design by Tarek El-Khatib of Toronto's Zeidler Partnership Architects -- a staid piece in the late 20th-century tradition of dowdy, dignified office buildings -- is the only completely routine item; it could have been put up in any North American downtown in 1975.
All the others strike notes that are sharply more contemporary, adventurous, even startling. A building that's not for the faint of heart, the exuberantly eccentric skyscraper by Michel Rojkind of rojkind arquitectos in Mexico City, resembles a great gorilla net dropped over a King Kong-sized melting ice cream bar.
In an abruptly different but equally audacious and romantic move, Yansong Ma, founder of the Michigan firm MAD office , gives us a tower of oomphy swerves, like a very tight dress with Marilyn Monroe inside it.
It would be wildly wonderful to see either Mr. Rojkind's tower or Mr. Ma's bazoomy dress in downtown Mississauga, or anywhere in Canada.
The best works here forcefully represent new international impulses in contemporary tall building design: an attractively show-offy thing about skins and surfaces, shimmer and gleam, and colour; and a spirit of experimentation when it comes to new building technologies that enable these monster residential blocks to shed their old up-and-down stiffness and twist upward toward the sky.
Both these towers remind us, as well, of the current influence on residential high-rise design of the outstanding Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, whose much-noticed recent projects feature much curving and DNA-like spiralling and other departures from modernist sobriety.
The second Toronto designer on the short list, Roland Rom Colthoff of Quadrangle Architects, has taken a step back from the avant-garde brink, but nevertheless brings off a memorable tower composed of a cylindrical core and square terraces, its elevations beautifully punctuated by full-sized living trees at various heights.
These adventuresome picks, by the way, have not been made by architectural eggheads with no investment in the outcome or practical experience of skyscrapers. On the nine-person jury are three top executives of Fernbrook Homes and Cityzen Development; Ed Sajecki, Mississauga's planning commissioner; and Larry Beasley, the Vancouver official planner widely praised for his successful, hard-nosed advocacy of good tower design in his home town. Also, the brief given to the competing architects gives every indication that Fernbrook and Cityzen are determined to get a workable plan out of this process, then build it at Hurontario and Burnhamthorpe.
But in the end, will this jury pick one of the most inventive designs on the table? The selection of Mr. El-Khatib's utterly conventional entry makes you wonder. Is this whole contest about garnering some relatively inexpensive advertising for the developers -- each of the six finalists in this widely noticed competition gets $25,000 -- by headlining some way-out architects in the preliminaries, then pulling back and handing the grand prize to the safest one? Or is it possible, as I believe, that the jury will actually give us the Greater Toronto Area's first skyscraper in the 21st-century manner -- an icon of global aspiration and big-city cosmopolitan flair? We'll find out in March.
