John Bentley May's critique, from the Globe Real Estate:
THE PERFECT HOUSE
Harbour plan needs daffiness weeded out
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
The outcome of Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp.'s (TWRC) international competition to make over the harbourfront, announced earlier this month, is a decidedly mixed bag of ideas, some worth pondering, others not worth thinking much about.
Though I've long been among those Torontonians nagging TWRC to get a move on and do something about the urban shoreline of Lake Ontario, I think the winning proposals by the Rotterdam architectural firm West 8 and its several Canadian partners need considerable extra scrutiny before any shovels hit the ground.
Take, for example, the suggestion that the Gardiner Expressway be demolished.
This notion has been kicking around for years, of course, and it has many devout supporters. The hobgoblin that Gardiner fans, including this writer, have long used to scare off these enemies of the monumental old freeway is the steep price tag — estimated at upwards of $2-billion — for the teardown and burial of its transportation decks.
This handy old tactic has been blunted over the past couple of years, however, by fresh proposals that include the relatively cheap teardown of the highway's elevated sections, but exclude most or all of the very expensive tunnelling. If these arguments prevail, we may yet lose the Gardiner, alas! In any case, it's high time Toronto got those public consultations on the expressway's future that TWRC has been promising us.
The weirdest proposal in the West 8 consortium's package would see a huge floating maple leaf dropped into the harbour. If TWRC were to carry out this kitschy exercise in branding, the result would be hilarious — if it weren't all so embarrassing. Ditto for the plan to put some big eggs with Chinese dragons in them at the foot of Spadina Avenue. Chinatown is surely one of the things on Spadina worth celebrating, but it's only one.
In the midst of these and other bits of daffiness — most of it springing from the European fantasy of Canada as a place where everyone wants to live in the woods — the West 8 group's dreams for Toronto's harbourside also feature some ideas that strike me as sound.
One is the sharp, strong demarcation of the 3.5 kilometres of shoreline between Bathurst and Parliament streets as a place for public promenading and the pleasures of walking, running, skating. A stately cosmopolitan edge, at no point less than 18 metres wide, would contain a continuous arrangement of planked boardwalk and little wooden bridges, and a margin of large native trees. The bridges, as illustrated in West 8's final report, would span the slips that now interrupt continuous passage along the harbourside. The designers rightly vow to respect much-loved existing features at the water's edge, such as the Music Garden and the skating rink at York Quay.
Among the most striking aspects of this scheme, however, has to do with the disposition of Queens Quay. This street is now four lanes wide — which is too wide — with two lanes of traffic going each way and a TTC streetcar line running between them. West 8 would close the two east-bound lanes and leave the TTC tracks where they are. Presto: a new, broad swath of pavement for pedestrian and bike traffic on the south side of the tracks, and a simple, cheap reduction of Queens Quay to an entirely reasonable breadth. (A trial shutdown of the east-bound lanes could start as early as this summer. We will be watching to see if this change helps vitalize the now-moribund sidewalks alongside the condominium towers on the north side of Queens Quay.)
While it contains questionable aesthetic whimsy — lighting poles shaped like the CN Tower, for example — West 8 group's final report nods attractively to Toronto's history. To city founder John Graves Simcoe goes the credit for first thinking, in 1793, of conserving the water's edge for the pleasure of the citizenry. Nor did the idea of a waterfront park between Fort York and the old Town of York —roughly, the stretch addressed by the West 8 planners — simply vanish when John and Elizabeth Simcoe returned to England a few years later. In 1818, a royal patent established several early Toronto residents as custodians of a "mall" intended to serve as a lakeside promenade. The Esplanade, now truncated and stranded far inland by landfill, is the remaining trace of this mall.
While not all of West 8's designs are worth putting on the ground, the part that has to do with the edge of the inner harbour is welcome. As for the rest of it — we'll be waiting to see what aspects of the scheme survive the upcoming long march through the public approvals process.
AoD