From the Globe:
DEVELOPMENT: 'HUGE AMOUNT OF DISAPPOINTMENT' OVER $160-MILLION PROJECT
Waterfront plan faces fresh controversy
Design panel blasts latest plans for building at foot of Jarvis, which omit vaunted egg-shaped auditorium
JOHN LORINC
Special to The Globe and Mail
December 10, 2007
A blue-chip design panel has criticized the latest architectural plans for the first major development planned for the Toronto waterfront, a $160-million office building now under construction at the foot of Jarvis Street.
"There's a huge amount of disappointment," said architect Bruce Kuwabara, chair of the 13-member design review panel, during a tense and at times farcical session of the Waterfront Toronto board.
"The things that were of interest [in designs reviewed last June] are gone and we can't support the project at that level."
The building is being developed by the Toronto Economic Development Corporation, a city agency, and will house 1,100 employees of Corus Entertainment, the media conglomerate. The funding comes from city loans and a $12.5-million contribution from Waterfront Toronto.
The redevelopment agency has said it wants the project, which was announced earlier this year, to meet high standards of design and environmental performance, as well as enhance the public realm in what will become the East Bayfront precinct.
Based on the Friday session, however, the Corus building could be facing months of controversy.
On a motion by Mayor David Miller, the waterfront board voted to withhold $9-million of its contribution unless the economic development corporation and its architects work closely with Mr. Kuwabara's design panel to solve several major architectural flaws.
The panel had offered a conditional thumb's up last June. But in his presentation on Friday, Mr. Kuwabara said the latest plans, submitted in November, were wanting in six critical areas.
The most grievous omission, he said, was the apparent loss of a large egg-shaped auditorium, to be situated in an open-concept atrium separating the two wings of an otherwise ordinary-looking glass office building. It appears prominently in drawings reviewed by the design panel last June, but disappears in subsequent renderings.
"The egg captured people's imaginations," Mr. Kuwabara said, referring to its resemblance to the pod-like lecture halls in the atrium of the Sir Norman Foster-designed Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building at the University of Toronto. "It was really magic."
But in one of the session's stranger exchanges, Toronto Economic Development Corporation chief executive Jeff Steiner denied the egg-shaped auditorium was ever an established feature of the project. "We never said it was definitely going to be an egg," he said. Mr. Steiner insisted the egg was merely a "conceptual" option and then characterized the review panel's recommendations as lacking "clarity".
Waterfront Toronto official Chris Glaisek, vice-president of planning and design, recalls the earlier plans quite differently. The egg "was presented as though it was in the design," he said. "It was not ambiguous."
After the meeting broke up, Ross McGregor, another Waterfront director, accused Mr. Steiner of "bait and switch" tactics.
Mr. Steiner, however, insisted that the mysteriously missing design details could be reintroduced as the project proceeds. "We'll make some improvements."
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Well, since Mr. Steiner is all about "conceptual notion", let him eat on the reality that site plan approval for this project is also a "conceptual notion" and could all of a sudden disappear without notice.
AoD
