Two Toronto condominium schemes are coming up right behind Shangri-La, he told me recently. He was short on details – understandably, since both projects are still in very early stages of development – but he did say that his favoured architect for one of the two is Denmark’s Bjarke Ingels.
“Bringing Bjarke in to do a building, if we’re able to put this all together, is going to open people’s eyes in Toronto to a world of possibilities,” he told me. “It will be a new form of development, not something anyone has ever seen before. When you see it you’ll go: Wow!”
If Mr. Gillespie follows through and hires Mr. Ingels to do the design – we should know some time next year if this deal is going through – it could indeed be good news for Toronto. In the five short years since he founded the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) in Copenhagen, the architect has become something of an international sensation. His fame is partly due to his boldly imaginative schemes for residential, commercial and cultural venues. (BIG’s first Canadian enterprise, a mixed-use Vancouver tower, is now on the drawing board. Developer: Ian Gillespie.)
But a powerful part of BIG’s appeal is the firm’s proven ability to deliver large-scale designs that satisfy the demands of the real-estate industry while fully embodying Mr. Ingels’s commitments to city-building and high artistic standards. Toronto would probably be fortunate to get a Westbank building by this rising star in the architectural firmament.