THE PERFECT HOUSE: URBAN PLANNING
A much-abused lakefront gets some love
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
Last week, James Corner, founder and director of the New York architectural firm Field Operations, flew into Toronto for the unveiling of his company's interim plans for Lake Ontario Park. The public event at the Radisson Admiral Hotel, which was thronged by some 400 interested citizens, was something we'd been looking forward to since early last year, when Field Operations landed a contract with Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. (TWRC) to transform a long strip of Hogtown's urban shoreline into a continuous refuge of beaches and wetlands.
The results of the firm's labours, as things have turned out, were worth waiting for. If our luck holds up and the money keeps flowing -- the cost of making Lake Ontario Park has been estimated at $300-million -- what Mr. Corner and his team have in mind will beautifully transfigure a mighty strip of Hogtown's dilapidated and long-abused waterfront into a place we can be rightly proud of. It will be the pride and joy, especially, of the thousands of people who will be living and working close to the water, once TWRC's $17-billion rollout of houses and business facilities is complete.
Speaking of Lake Ontario Park, Mr. Corner told me: "We want to capitalize on the scale of its wildness, its lake-edge context. It's all edge. There is no huge interior like Central Park [in New York] or Stanley Park. Our project involved creating a park that is publicly accessible while keeping the wilderness, exposure to the weather, openness to ecology."
A driving idea in the scheme is to keep "hard" landscaping light on the ground.
Print Edition - Section Front
Enlarge Image
"If you start building promenades, railings, trash cans and other furnishings, you start losing scale and the sense of place. We will be trying to keep [the park] as open as possible."
While there will be a few of what Mr. Corner calls "iconic destinations" -- restaurants, interpretation centres and such -- the site will be given over mostly to long thoroughfares skirting the water's edge, meant for the enjoyment of runners, cyclists and walkers. "There will be lots of walking and cycling, and two- to four-hour walks -- not 10-minute promenades. Boating is going to be huge, and nature education [that involves] just being in nature."
One of the most intriguing parts of the Field Operations scheme is a 140-acre "dunescape of hills and hollows," proposed for a swatch of poisoned ground between Unwin Avenue and the lake, in the port industrial district. "Existing contamination can be dealt with by capping it," Mr. Corner said. This feature, to be called The Bar, recreates Fisherman's Island, a long sandbar that once stood between the open lake and the huge, wild marsh (now filled in) at the mouth of the Don River.
What is most impressive in the overall plan, however, is its sheer breadth of vision. Instead of dealing with the opportunity provided by our shoreline in a piecemeal fashion -- in the manner too characteristic of city hall, that is -- Field Operations proposes we think boldly and grandly, and seize the day. The result could well be one of the world's great waterfront parks: a margin of excellent recreational real estate between the city and Lake Ontario, where land and water meet in a marvellous variety of ways.
As Toronto embarks on this adventure of imagination, we should be glad to have James Corner on our side. He is one of North America's outstanding landscape architects and urban designers. His current projects include the transformation of a 2,200-acre Staten Island dump site into a culturally vivid, ecologically diverse park, and (with the architectural office Diller Scofidio + Renfro) the creation of New York's celebrated High Line park, which will see a 2.4-kilometre stretch of abandoned elevated railway turned into a new urban trail suspended above the Manhattan sidewalks.
In these and other projects, Field Operations is riding the surging wave of public interest in saving and rejuvenating the wastelands left by North America's Industrial Age.
"The past 20 years has seen a huge abundance of brownfields, abandoned post-industrial sites, abandoned airports and port facilities," Mr. Corner said. "They are very big, technically complicated because of pollution, sometimes in strange locations with regard to the city."
Toronto's blasted industrial brownfields will be saved from their current state of ruin, if all unfolds on the waterfront as expected. We look forward to Field Operations' final plans for Lake Ontario Park, which should be ready this summer.
jmays@globeandmail.com
