Late last week UrbanToronto had the pleasure of sitting down with Don Schmitt, principal at Diamond + Schmitt Architects, for a discussion about Minto's most recent condominium offering, The AvenDale, at the southwest corner of Lonsdale Avenue and Avenue Road.

The AvenDale Condominiums Toronto, image courtesy of the Minto Group

Tell us about AvenDale as you see it. What message did you want to convey with this design?

Well it's an amazing site. It’s on a corner just south of Upper Canada College which, although private, acts as a large park in the city. The site also has a special relationship with the rest of the city since half of Toronto comes down Avenue Road every morning and is driving straight towards the site before they move south. So it really is a building which needed to pivot the site and pivot the corner and in response to this, we developed a building that has four wings. Each wing, in and of itself is quite small and narrow and vertical, and the issue was to step those at different heights so that you are creating a kind of terminus at the corner, while pivoting the building around the corner. That way, you get a sense when driving from the east that this is facing you and kind of pivoting around the corner before you head south on Avenue Road.

In your book, Insight and On Site (2008), you describe the building as a ‘pinwheel.’

Yes, I like that description.

We first saw AvenDale as ‘Minto Lonsdale’ a few years back. Since then, the design has changed with regard to its materiality and general shape, but has retained the pinwheel plan you described earlier. Tell us about the process by which the design evolved and matured.

You know, it’s a building that went through many levels of city approval. We worked closely with the community and the neighbourhood and I think Minto knew they had an extremely special site. Originally the units were going to be smaller but they realized that the desirability of the site made it a compelling and interesting address for purchasers who potentially wanted larger units. So the units started to grow from more conventional and apartment-sized to something which is similar in scale to the houses that people might be moving out of. As the units got bigger, the material palette evolved to include more stone, and we added things like bronze frames to the windows. It really went upmarket in terms of the detail and the warmth and welcome one feels on arrival.

Nigel Terpstra sits down with Don Schmitt, image by Craig White

One of the things that Diamond + Schmitt is known for is their close attention to context, so how does AvenDale fit into Forest Hill?

What’s great about that particular context is that along Avenue Road from St. Clair to Lonsdale you’ve got a double row of really great mid-century buildings. Peter Dickenson buildings of 12 to 19 stories and things along that line. You also have that classic Toronto condition where the main avenues are lined with big buildings which immediately drop away to residential neighbourhoods on either side. So we were informed by that condition as we were the last site aligning that urban apartment zone. My parents used to call it the ‘Gold Coast’ - I don’t know where that came from, maybe a reference to Chicago - but this was the glamour-1960s era - I think there’s a restaurant in one of those buildings. We are very much part of that context of taking the scale of the building and breaking it down so yes, it’s a 19 story building, but it’s been articulated to relate to the smaller scale of the houses on the other side.

And there’s that great terminus of the Upper Canada College clock tower.

Absolutely, yes.

Changing direction a little, you've often spoken to the importance of having a ‘good’ client, or, one who shares your values. Describe how Diamond + Schmitt collaborated with Minto to bring this building to market.

Well Minto began the whole process by holding a design competition. They invited, if I recall, 5 architects, maybe 6, to submit ideas. That design competition was the basis for selection, so it was a full process of looking for design excellence. Second, Minto are patient and careful and considerate in terms of working through how the building is configured, how it responds to the neighbourhood and how it responds to the market. I think Allen Greenburg who was heading the company is very interested in doing things well, and he and Chris Sheriff Scott were very focused on getting it right. Of course, that‘s a great sounding board for an architect; sometimes it drives you crazy because things move around, but their objective is to get the best possible result in the end. Even if it does drive you a bit crazy along the way that attitude is great, you can’t really ask for more.

How many people were involved in bringing AvenDale to market? We know Brian Gluckstein is doing the interiors and there are surely others, so how do all parties collaborate?

We work very closely with Brian Gluckstein. Minto believes that he has his finger on the pulse of the tastes and interests of this kind of purchaser, so he was really part of developing the interior layouts within the building we had designed. So we’re doing the envelope and the key materials and the entrance and public spaces, Brian is doing the interiors, and then there’s landscape which was conceptually designed by Phillips Farevaag Smallenburg’s Greg Smallenburg from Vancouver. Once again, because of that great landscape of that part of the city, the landscaping on the site was given a lot of importance. Those were the three main teams that collaborated on AvenDale, but because PFS are in Vancouver, there’s also Paul Ferris Landscape Architects who are implementing the key parts of that design.

The AvenDale Condominium's Port Cochere, image courtesy of the Minto Group

Drawing back a little, the notion of a ‘Toronto Style’ is something that is often hotly debated on UrbanToronto. What's your take on that notion and, if such a school exists, where do you situate Diamond + Schmitt within that context?

It’s a very interesting question. I think it’s probably hard when you’re in the middle of it to really identify what its key characteristics are, but it’s interesting because you hear about Toronto having a distinctive style from people who come up from the US who say: "oh, there’s very clearly something unique here." One of the things that’s quite extraordinary is the development of the ‘apartment tower’ in the last decade. There’s really been some inventive exploration of transparency and solidity, of small floorplates. For example, we’re working on a 48 story tower which only has a 6500ft2 floorplate. There’s really a sense of the character of transparent apartment living which has been developed in very interesting ways in Toronto and certainly people like architectsAlliance have been tremendous innovators in pushing a radical agenda. Toronto used to be far more conservative and cautious in the language and the invention in residential and now people like aA or Core Architects are pushing that expression forwards. Hopefully we’ve been part of that conversation too, and while we’ve had less of a portfolio of residential, that's changing. We now have a dozen different residential towers underway in the office, from Charlie which is under construction just around the corner, to Pace, to AvenDale. So while Diamond + Schmitt are very much engaged more broadly, architecture of this city has matured incredibly in terms of the use of light and the use of materials like masonry, all while building on some of the historic traditions of the city. Where else would one build an opera house out of brick than in Toronto? In lots of places, it would be considered completely inappropriate to use such an ordinary material to make such an important building, but in a place like Toronto which has a real clay, masonry tradition, it's possible. And it is also a city with a sort of 'northern' tradition of big windows, lots of transparency, grasping lots of light, and using natural materials like copper and exposed woods. I think the other piece that’s really important in defining a 'Toronto Style' is insisting on sustainability. Currently we have three projects on their way to LEED Platinum and many LEED Gold projects and projects which are getting closer to net-carbon zero. I think it's a Toronto tradition which was initially thought of as West Coast phenomenon, but I think those characteristics have only been cemented in a few practices.

Do you see a demand for sustainable features reflected in the buyer at all? Do purchasers feel that it’s something that's important to them?

In fairness, not enough, particularly in residential. I think there's an issue about getting a balance between efficiency and transparency in high-rise and that issue is starting to come more to the fore. People like Minto and Daniels have really been leading-edge. Minto has always strived for LEED certifications in their projects and the two buildings we’re doing for Daniels in Regent Park are LEED Gold. In a place like Regent Park it wasn’t obvious that people would really want buy market housing there and I think the quality of the design, the quality of the energy efficiency, the fact that there’s a separate district energy plant, the fact that there’s so much attention to how the building is made, speaks to a sophisticated buyer who may want to take a little risk in the urban centre. It’s a market that’s maturing a lot and fast.

UrbanToronto sits down with Don Schmitt, image by Craig White

Finally, we were talking about the ‘Toronto Style’ – how do you see AvenDale within that expression?

It’s interesting because it’s a slightly different building than we normally see. It’s a bigger floorplate than what has become the Toronto norm but that form was strongly supported but the planners who saw the ‘pinwheel’ strategy and the idea of that site being a turning-point in the city as important characteristics. I think it’s within that context of understanding the neighbourhood, and keeping a scale that’s consistent with the other apartments along that two blocks of Avenue Road. I think it's very much a part of that Toronto-style of paying attention to context, holding the street, defining how the street edge ends at that point when it moves towards Forest Hill Village. So in a sense, maybe those are some of the best characteristics of Toronto architecture, that sense of the individual building as part of a larger whole.

Thanks very much Don!

Tomorrow UrbanToronto returns to The AvenDale for a close-up tour around the presentation centre and the scale model, and releases our dataBase entry for the building with many more renderings.

Related Companies:  Diamond Schmitt Architects, Ferris + Associates Inc., Minto Communities GTA, Peter McCann Architectural Models Inc.