AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
It is indeed at the western end of the ribbon building.
AoD
Toronto 31R Parliament Street | 165.8m | 49s | Cityscape | SHoP
- Thread starter AlvinofDiaspar
- Start date
It is indeed at the western end of the ribbon building.
AoD
CharmAlarm
Active Member
Redroom - the renderings you see are for the two towers of Clear Spirits which haven't been built yet. What has been built (or near completion) is Pure Spirits - see separate thread for that.
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
And they're an earlier version of the design - not the Clear Spirit tower that bulges out slightly in the middle that replaced it.
Archivist
Senior Member
Here is the article from Canadian Architect:
31A Parliament Street, Distillery District
Award of Excellence
ARCHITECT ARCHITECTSALLIANCE
LOCATION TORONTO, ONTARIO
31A Parliament Street is a six-storey freestanding commercial/retail building located at the southwestern edge of the Distillery District, in what was the commercial district of 19th-century Toronto. Over the past six years, a private development company has repurposed this superlative collection of limestone and brick industrial buildings--formerly the Gooderham and Worts Distillery--as an arts and culture precinct comprising stores, galleries, craft studios and performance spaces.
On behalf of the developer, the architects have designed a new structure that will house the production facilities and corporate headquarters of a multi-media production company. The building will be sited on what is now a surface parking lot at the edge of the Distillery District. It will extend the fabric of the District to the south and west, and will complement an adjacent mixed-use high-rise development that the architects are designing for the same client.
The program includes sound and broadcast studios, film labs, administrative offices, meeting rooms and lounges along with retail space and a multi-storey public atrium at grade. Underground parking will accommodate staff and visitors while preserving the District's pedestrian-friendly public realm.
The architectural conceit behind 31A Parliament is the reinterpretation of a characteristic Distillery building type: the rackhouse, where casks of aging spirits were stored in four- and five-storey-high post-and-beam timber frames. A grid of concrete beams supports the new structure, which is divided along its east-west axis to present two contrasting façades reflecting the distribution of the building's programmatic elements.
The transparent north-facing volume animates a new public square and evokes the light and transparency of the film medium, animated by free-floating, multi-coloured production units randomly scattered across the grid. In their work for academic clients, the architects have discovered that new ideas are often generated outside the workplace proper. Accordingly, multi-storey lounges are located at grade and are interwoven with studio space throughout the production side of the building; these create amenity for staff and provide opportunities for informal networking and brainstorming.
The south-facing masonry volume echoes the form and mass of adjacent warehouses. The grid is filled in with a series of narrow floor plates that accommodate the tenant's administrative functions and centralized building systems.
Daoust: A simple yet elegant building that works with the evocative power of the site. An immaterial and seamless façade showcases a powerful emulation of the post-and-beam timber frame construction now housing the volumes of the production units. This project opposes a glass box and a masonry volume and empowers both. Sadly, no information was provided on the masonry volume.
Kearns: This is an elegantly contrived solution to the challenge of building in a unique former industrial heritage district. The architect has engaged with the context not just in planning terms but also in the scale, texture and construction regime of Toronto's industrial heritage. A walk through the Distillery District impresses on the visual and tactile senses a continuum of textured red, gritty brick and rough limestone surfaces punctured by small window and door openings. This project opts to stay within that family--it acknowledges its contextual regime but provides us with refreshing respite in its smooth glassy skin, transparency, lightness and precision of construction. The architecture resonates well with the programmatic functions of a multi-media company--it is a big window in a district of brick and stone.
Ostry: This project takes a deceptively simple idea from a collection of Victorian warehouses on a national historic site and produces a design that promises a dramatic contemporary expression. Despite the architects' claim of conceit behind the reinterpretation of a building type, the design does not resort to an architectural language of cliché or rhetoric. The curtain wall acts as a marquee to the public realm as well as a skin around a jumble of "floating" containers that make abstract reference to original pot stills. The independent systems of vertical circulation do not appear to reinforce the potential for adaptability to change.
Krawczyk: I think it looks cool.
CLIENT CITYSCAPE DEVELOPMENTS INC.
ARCHITECT TEAM PETER CLEWES, ADAM FELDMANN, HAJI NAKAMURA, SANJA JANJANIN
STRUCTURAL JABLONSKY, AST AND PARTNERS
MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL ABLE ENGINEERING INC.
INTERIORS ARCHITECTSALLIANCE
AREA 6,500 M2 (RETAIL 835 M2; COMMERCIAL/PUBLIC SPACE 5,665 M2)
BUDGET $16 M
COMPLETION 2009
31A Parliament Street, Distillery District
Award of Excellence
ARCHITECT ARCHITECTSALLIANCE
LOCATION TORONTO, ONTARIO
31A Parliament Street is a six-storey freestanding commercial/retail building located at the southwestern edge of the Distillery District, in what was the commercial district of 19th-century Toronto. Over the past six years, a private development company has repurposed this superlative collection of limestone and brick industrial buildings--formerly the Gooderham and Worts Distillery--as an arts and culture precinct comprising stores, galleries, craft studios and performance spaces.
On behalf of the developer, the architects have designed a new structure that will house the production facilities and corporate headquarters of a multi-media production company. The building will be sited on what is now a surface parking lot at the edge of the Distillery District. It will extend the fabric of the District to the south and west, and will complement an adjacent mixed-use high-rise development that the architects are designing for the same client.
The program includes sound and broadcast studios, film labs, administrative offices, meeting rooms and lounges along with retail space and a multi-storey public atrium at grade. Underground parking will accommodate staff and visitors while preserving the District's pedestrian-friendly public realm.
The architectural conceit behind 31A Parliament is the reinterpretation of a characteristic Distillery building type: the rackhouse, where casks of aging spirits were stored in four- and five-storey-high post-and-beam timber frames. A grid of concrete beams supports the new structure, which is divided along its east-west axis to present two contrasting façades reflecting the distribution of the building's programmatic elements.
The transparent north-facing volume animates a new public square and evokes the light and transparency of the film medium, animated by free-floating, multi-coloured production units randomly scattered across the grid. In their work for academic clients, the architects have discovered that new ideas are often generated outside the workplace proper. Accordingly, multi-storey lounges are located at grade and are interwoven with studio space throughout the production side of the building; these create amenity for staff and provide opportunities for informal networking and brainstorming.
The south-facing masonry volume echoes the form and mass of adjacent warehouses. The grid is filled in with a series of narrow floor plates that accommodate the tenant's administrative functions and centralized building systems.
Daoust: A simple yet elegant building that works with the evocative power of the site. An immaterial and seamless façade showcases a powerful emulation of the post-and-beam timber frame construction now housing the volumes of the production units. This project opposes a glass box and a masonry volume and empowers both. Sadly, no information was provided on the masonry volume.
Kearns: This is an elegantly contrived solution to the challenge of building in a unique former industrial heritage district. The architect has engaged with the context not just in planning terms but also in the scale, texture and construction regime of Toronto's industrial heritage. A walk through the Distillery District impresses on the visual and tactile senses a continuum of textured red, gritty brick and rough limestone surfaces punctured by small window and door openings. This project opts to stay within that family--it acknowledges its contextual regime but provides us with refreshing respite in its smooth glassy skin, transparency, lightness and precision of construction. The architecture resonates well with the programmatic functions of a multi-media company--it is a big window in a district of brick and stone.
Ostry: This project takes a deceptively simple idea from a collection of Victorian warehouses on a national historic site and produces a design that promises a dramatic contemporary expression. Despite the architects' claim of conceit behind the reinterpretation of a building type, the design does not resort to an architectural language of cliché or rhetoric. The curtain wall acts as a marquee to the public realm as well as a skin around a jumble of "floating" containers that make abstract reference to original pot stills. The independent systems of vertical circulation do not appear to reinforce the potential for adaptability to change.
Krawczyk: I think it looks cool.
CLIENT CITYSCAPE DEVELOPMENTS INC.
ARCHITECT TEAM PETER CLEWES, ADAM FELDMANN, HAJI NAKAMURA, SANJA JANJANIN
STRUCTURAL JABLONSKY, AST AND PARTNERS
MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL ABLE ENGINEERING INC.
INTERIORS ARCHITECTSALLIANCE
AREA 6,500 M2 (RETAIL 835 M2; COMMERCIAL/PUBLIC SPACE 5,665 M2)
BUDGET $16 M
COMPLETION 2009
3Dementia
Senior Member
alklay
Senior Member
A potentially beautiful building.
p5connex
Active Member
There we go- that is the project I was just going to post as well..The image quality from Canadian Architects website is pretty bad, but I probably good enough to get a good idea of what he project will be like.
Now that latest images clear up what the project is, are the first images showing a further expansion of what aA is doing in the Distillery right now?
p5
Now that latest images clear up what the project is, are the first images showing a further expansion of what aA is doing in the Distillery right now?
p5
3Dementia
Senior Member
The Clear Spirit towers now have a wavy glass balcony design (renders are probably buried somewhere on this site) but the "ribbon building" is seen clearly in the pics posted earlier. This building runs along the south perimeter of the site from Cherry west to this new project, enclosing the DD and buffering it from the rail embankment... a really terrific element.
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
As with Pier 27, where elements of the industrial architecture of a working port inspire the design of a series of residential buildings, here the rack house is reinterpreted in contemporary terms. The southern limit of the Distillery District becomes more defined, the network of pedestrian lanes with their sense of enclosure - a characteristic of the original, working distillery - is extended ... and with a couple more buildings to the west of 31A that process will be concluded.
unimaginative2
Senior Member
That's a pleasant building built to a contextual scale on an empty site. Exactly the kind of thing we should be seeing in the Distillery.
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
Actually, the row of old stone-faced buildings immediately to the north are single storey, not six. But then the well-established contextual scale of the Distillery District development is an expression of such tall/short contrasts.
I interpret that the building, "will complement an adjacent mixed-use high-rise development that the architects are designing for the same client" as referring to the empty site to the west of 31A - where we will see a tower of some sort announced in due course, matching the existing context of the Pure Spirit tower nearing completion.
I interpret that the building, "will complement an adjacent mixed-use high-rise development that the architects are designing for the same client" as referring to the empty site to the west of 31A - where we will see a tower of some sort announced in due course, matching the existing context of the Pure Spirit tower nearing completion.
H
Hydrogen
Guest
Completely agree! That rendering is very encouraging.
syn
Senior Member
I totally agree.
It seems as though development for the Distillery and surrounding areas is being done inside out.
ProjectEnd
Superstar
Is this project still going ahead? If it's part of Pure Spirits' / Gooderham's snake-like amenity space it should be built, no?
rdaner
Senior Member
Anything new on this?