Toronto Lower Don Lands Redevelopment | ?m | ?s | Waterfront Toronto

Re: East Gardiner �dea

MMVA for me.
That is the only plan that I like. The Weiss plan and Stoss are a close second with Atelier coming WAY behind everything else. Verticle towers in finger parks is not good.
MMVA winds the green parkland into a complete grid, not just linear fingers. MMVA creates several "iconic" viewpoints throughout the Portlands, and creates a greater # of "edges" for promenades, street shopping, bike paths etc etc.
 
Re: East Gardiner �dea

Exactly. The Keating Channel is what really sold me. I loved how it created a riverside urban promenade. My real dream would be to see decking over the DVP and maybe Bayview south of Danforth, turning it into a Wacker Drive of sorts. The top portion could be turned into a small road and wide riverside promenade with shops and restaurants.
 
Re: East Gardiner �dea

It's just so hard to imagine Keating channel in those designs. I mean really, its filthy, stinky, with weird looking stuff floating on top. I hope the work upstream will clean it up and one day we can enjoy the stroll imagined in those designs.
 
Re: East Gardiner �dea

Thanks for the find! It's too bad that it had to be theirs. I love that second slide with the map of the "Green Void" in the downtown area, suggesting that the closest green is in High Park and the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, right next to massive swaths of green.
 
Re: East Gardiner �dea

It's just so hard to imagine Keating channel in those designs. I mean really, its filthy, stinky, with weird looking stuff floating on top

I agree. With still water and the freeway and its noise above the MMVA project probably has the greatest chances that the pretty picture will not match the reality.
 
Re: East Gardiner �dea

Is MMVA the only one that makes explicit provision for a few other old buildings (like the little Darling & Pearson Greek Revival bank building at Cherry + Villiers)?
 
Re: East Gardiner �dea

Has anybody had a chance to view the models down in the BCE attrium? I only saw them in passing last night while walking home with a co-worker. If nobody else does I'll see if I can grab some pictures on the weekend if they're still there.
 
Re: East Gardiner �dea

The problem with models is that they promote an airplane-level perspective of an environment that will be experienced at pedestrian-level. They have a different set of problems from renderings.
 
Hey, great news! I'm definitely pleased with the choice, though the plan is far from perfect. I just hope that they don't water down the Keating Channel promenade -- the best part of the plan -- and add more endless grass.
 
All the proposals seemed far too tower-in-the-park for me, but this was the least-so of the bunch. I'd perfer to see the parkland more concentrated. Contrary to what the common belief seems to be, Toronto has a good amount of parkland downtown. It's just that it's all in dribs and drabs here and there, very few good, large parks (ignoring the islands, of course). The people who move into these places will have to be SERIOUS parkland lovers, counting that each block also has a sizable courtyard. Where are they going to spend their time, courtyard or park? It's unlikely to be both and it's a serious question. I don't have the time right now, but I would like to see some calculations on what percentage of the development will be greenspace and compare that to other sections of the city and similar developments elsewhere.

I worry that none of the residential 'sectors' will be large enough to provide the critical mass needed for urbanity. Even more reflection on how we used to build cities and the KISS principle would have made me more enthusastic.
 
A winning vision for the Lower Don plan
TheStar.com - News - A winning vision for the Lower Don plan

May 09, 2007
Christopher Hume

Imagine the Keating Channel lined with housing. Picture the old concrete riverbed at the centre of a series of new sustainable neighbourhoods and parks.

This is one of the ideas included in the winning scheme in the Lower Don Land Design Competition. Sponsored and organized by the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp., the competition attracted some of the best landscape architects, architects and planners from here and around the world.

The winning entry, announced yesterday evening at the Royal Ontario Museum, was submitted by Michael Van Valkenburgh (New York), Behnisch Architects (Los Angeles) and Ken Greenberg (Toronto).

The area covered by the competition is that long-neglected land around the mouth of the Don River.

It extends from the Parliament St. slip to Don Roadway in the east.

Entrants were asked to determine how the renaturalized river mouth would meet the lake and how the surrounding area would be developed. The site, which also includes the Gardiner Expressway, will combine highly urban conditions and green spaces.

The plan also had to provide ways of dealing with the flooding of the Don, something that happens regularly.

The winning team's answer is an "urban estuary," which it describes as "a new type of territory where city, lake and river interact in a dynamic and balanced relationship ..."

Farther south, the ship channel would become a "family-oriented neighbourhood with access to the water and the park."

TWRC vice-president of development Chris Glaisek said yesterday he was thrilled with the result.

"It's the most exciting proposal in terms of how it resolves the competing pressures of development, naturalization and transportation."

The Van Valkenburgh team envisions a streetcar line running east along Queens Quay, then extending south down Cherry St. across Commissioners St.

Though the plan didn't include it, the streetcar could eventually cross the ship channel.

From the start, issues of sustainability have informed all the ideas behind waterfront redevelopment. That means no resident will be more than five minutes from public transit.

Though planners expect there will be housing for 100,000 by the time the dust finally settles two or three decades from now, this particular area will become home to 10,000.

"I think it's a brilliant move," Glaisek said, "a way of thinking outside the box and of giving the river its own identity. Everyone has always assumed you would have to take out Keating Channel. They said, no, leave it there and make it a focal point between two new neighbourhoods."

But there's still much to be done before construction begins. As Glaisek explained, the winning team will be contracted to work with Toronto Region Conservation Authority to continue through the completion of the environmental assessment process. Assuming all goes well, that should last at least 18 months.

"It's not sexy," Glaisek admitted, "but it's very important. After that the team can start producing final design documents. So we could see the start of construction about 2 1/2 years from now."

This is the second project on the Toronto waterfront for the team leader, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. Several years ago, he won a similar competition to design Don River Park. It will anchor a new neighbourhood on the west side of the Don just north of the Lower Don site.

Nothing on the waterfront moves quickly, however, and work on that park won't begin until the engineering required to make it floodproof is completed sometime this fall.

"Michael and his team have come up with a beautiful, elegant resolution of the problems. Michael's familiar with what we're trying to do here, so he had a running start. And we're thrilled to have Ken (Greenberg) working on the waterfront."

Highly regarded as an urban planner, Greenberg could have become Toronto's chief planner.

He turned down the job because he wasn't convinced the position is one the city takes seriously enough.
 
From the Globe, by Lisa Rochon:

Winning design returns Don River to its rightful place in the city
Lisa Rochon
The Globe and Mail
May 9, 2007
A14

Imagine the Keating Channel as a generous reflecting pool with people living on its banks the way they do in Chicago, Amsterdam and Venice. Send a great green tongue of parkland into the lake. Dig up the dusty land of Toronto's Port Lands to create a meandering estuary with an island in the middle of it.

These are the key design moves in a 21st-century scheme for returning the Don River to its rightful place in Toronto - a triumph of design both lyrical and efficient. The vision belongs to Michael Van Valkenburgh, a Harvard university professor with a glittering reputation as an intelligent healer of the modern city. Together with Behnisch Architects, Greenberg Consultants and Great Eastern Ecology, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) was named yesterday as the winner of the Lower Don Lands design competition.

It's a win not only for MVVA, but for the hundreds of citizens who have fought for the past 30 years for the reinvention of the Don River. And it's a win for the City of Toronto. The international competition, organized by the increasingly impressive Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp., recognizes the deep loss of the Don River, a fact of nature rendered nearly invisible by the Don Valley Parkway, industries and regular flow of storm water into its waters.

What once provided the geographic splendour of the original town of York, the Don River has suffered countless abuses over more than a century.

The neck of the Don River was broken in the 1880s, its big, powerful waters forced into a 90-degree right turn through the man-made Keating Channel.

Ever since, the idea of nature has been beaten out of the river.

The brilliance of the MVVA scheme lies in its design clarity. This may have to do with Prof. Van Valkenburgh's extensive experience healing the placelessness of tough, highly urbanized cities. He is designing one of the major sections of the Hudson River Park in New York, as well as Brooklyn Bridge Park, designed with rocky beaches and floating pathways as a "meditation" on the connection between the East River and Brooklyn's shoreline.

Other competing schemes, such as the one produced by the Boston-based firm Stoss with Brown + Storey Architects and ZAS Architects, broke apart the concrete walls of the Keating Channel in order to suggest a landscape virgin and untamed - something pre-industrial - with an interest in reconstructing the vast marshland delta that once sprawled from the mouth of the Don River.

The scheme by Weiss/Manfredi Architects, an inspired New York-based partnership responsible for the stunning Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, offers the most joyous waterfront architecture of the four competing schemes. Its outlook pavilion - a blade of glass - seduces the public to the tip of an elongated pier and gives us reason to want to go there.

But, rather than leaving the Keating Channel alone and interpreting it as a Venetian canal, the team opted to curve the river into the Lower Don meander, with a recreational valley of open, public space dipping further south in the Port Lands. This is a lovely idea that recalls another, more bucolic era - but getting there requires tons of money, more than the $160-million the TWRC currently has in the bank, and risks a nostalgia for a place and a time that is long gone. Torontonians are better off looking ahead, not back.

As with the other finalists, the winning scheme also pushes the proposed and much delayed Commissioners Park to a site further south, removing it from contaminated lands to merge with the wilderness areas proposed by MVVA. The $60-million set aside by the TWRC for Commissioners Park, designed by Montreal-based landscape architect Claude Cormier, will now be mostly dedicated to the naturalization of the Don River. Claude Cormier will not be involved in the newly located Commissioners Park, said Christopher Glaisek, vice-president of development for the TWRC.

The reinvention of the Don River and the areas surrounding it represents a massive undertaking, one that could take up to 30 years to accomplish.

What's significant is that the TWRC has effectively led on the need to establish a strong network of public spaces before opening the Port Lands to development. The Task Force to Bring Back the Don deserves big kudos for its tireless lobbying and campaigns to restore the river little by little. And, with the MVVA scheme, says Mr. Glaisek, signs of serious remediation could be evident at the southern tip of the Don River within five years.

Photographer Ed Burtynsky, acclaimed for his large-scale images of industry's impact on natural landscapes, sat on the competition jury, along with architect Bruce Kuwabara, landscape architect Charles Waldheim, Montreal architect Renée Daoust and the legendary Canadian engineer Morden Yolles.

Together they struggled to find a design that would reclaim some of the natural beauty of the Don River while pointing the vastly underutilized area of the Port Lands to efficient and thoughtful redevelopment. Along the way, there were surprises. The proposal by the European team, led by the Zurich-based Atelier Girot, offered the greatest number of architectural weirdness, with long street corridors lined with tall, slightly kinked towers.

Torontonians are only now coming to terms with being lake people. The seasonal delights at the Toronto Music Garden have provided an inspiring place to visit. The boardwalk and piers have been redesigned at Harbourfront. And West 8, a leading landscape architecture firm from Holland, has recently won the international competition to connect the city's central waterfront with a wooden boardwalk, maple trees and pedestrian bridges intended to gracefully lift visitors up and over the slips. Soon enough, we'll be able to dip our toes into Lake Ontario while sitting on the edge of the HtO park at the foot of Spadina Avenue. To imagine ourselves as a river people will require another reinvention of self, another leap of faith. As Jim once told Huck, his future was drifting down the river. But, in the case of Toronto, bringing nature back into the city is an idea that is moving gracefully upstream.

lrochon@globeandmail.com

Credit: SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

AoD
 
"It's just so hard to imagine Keating channel in those designs. I mean really, its filthy, stinky, with weird looking stuff floating on top."

Actually most people find Amsterdam and Venice quite charming regardless.

I agree with CDL that the problem with many of these waterfront district designs is not the architecture or the parks but the orientation, massing and overall size of the built out portions. These might end up being nice places to live in an etobicoke lakeshore kind of way but I predict that little of the vitality that makes our existing neighbourhoods successful will be emulated here. Like the humber river lakeshore environment some interesting destinations, views and sites will be created that will make it a great area to go on a bike ride in the summer and for this I look forward to seeing it built.
 

Back
Top