From Lisa Rochon's article in Globe TO today:
8) 3C Lakeshore (designs to be released later this fall)
Master plan architects: Foster + Partners, U.K.
Client: Cityzen Development Group, Castlepoint Realty Partners of Toronto and Continental of NYC
After interviewing starchitects such as Santiago Calatrava, Christian de Portzamparc and Rem Koolhaas, the Toronto owners of 3C Lakeshore appointed British mega firm Foster + Partners to master-plan the largest single parcel held privately on the Toronto waterfront and previously owned by Home Depot. Technically falling outside Waterfront Toronto’s borders for the East Bayfront, this plot of land is bordered to the north by the Distillery District and the Gardiner Expressway; the critically positioned site overlooks the Keating Channel to the south – which has the potential to become Toronto's own Venetian canal. The massive silo complex, built in the 1940s by E.P. Taylor Victory Mills company to house soybeans, but now owned by Castlepoint, rises to the west of the property with Cherry Street to the east
“We’re embracing our immediate neighbourhood,” says Castlepoint’s Alfredo Romano, who was a philosophy and religion academic before becoming a developer. “It sounds romantic but you have to walk a site and listen to it.”
A pedestrian bridge is being considered for the 3C development site along with some iconic towers and low- to mid-rise housing. As an homage to the original Gooderham and Worts distillery, “Whiskey Beach” is being designed by Montreal landscape architect Claude Cormier to complete the enchanting triad of sandy beaches along the downtown lakeshore. The question is whether the acclaimed London-based Foster’s will bring its star power to re-activate a remarkable, urban and historically loaded site or whether something middling will result. Local talents Peter Clewes and Bruce Kuwabara have been hired by the 3C developers to weigh in as architects of particular buildings and to temper, perhaps, any wildfires from, say, the mall designer Eric Kuhne – a 3C consultant tasked with figuring how to best deploy a city requirement for providing 300,000 square feet of commercial space on the 13-acre site. As a sideshow, and unbeknownst to the 3C developers, he recently silver-tongued his way through a city hall presentation on how to re-image the Port Lands, with a patchwork of borrowed ideas, including the London Eye Ferris wheel. How boring the world would be if cities were merely mirror images of each other. Far more enduring are those developments in any city that tap into deep local roots. For Toronto, that means tuning into a culture of tolerance, diversity and open-minded investment – all in the spirit of a New World city.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...r-a-critics-report-card/article2195138/page2/
AoD
