Toronto Sherbourne Common, Canada's Sugar Beach, and the Water's Edge Promenade | ?m | ?s | Waterfront Toronto | Teeple Architects

Love that last shot, particularly since I've only seen the water working once. Every other time I've been there, it has been off. :(
 
14337829630_321a08d2a4_o.png


14338029287_460f9e5d29_o.png


Nuff said.
 
Last edited:
tris said:
Is that rust around the edges of the umbrellas?
Click to expand...
In the graphic above it says that the umbrellas are fiberglass, on a stainless steel skeleton, and that the colour is in the material, not paint. So I would guess not. If I'm seeing what I think you're seeing, it looks too uniform to be rust.
 
Everything looks fantastic. Nothing is superfluous in the design, except perhaps the stripes on the rocks. Even those are creative details evocative of the stripes on sugar-sweet candy.
 
junctionist said:
Everything looks fantastic. Nothing is superfluous in the design, except perhaps the stripes on the rocks. Even those are creative details evocative of the stripes on sugar-sweet candy.
Click to expand...

Well the stripes cover up the cracks in the rock since it had to be sliced up then re-assembled.
 
Marcanadian said:
Well the stripes cover up the cracks in the rock since it had to be sliced up then re-assembled.
Click to expand...

You are both correct - though the design proposal makes it clear that the stripes are meant to evoke the stripes in sugar candy. In fact the original proposal would have multi-coloured stripes instead of just white and red ones.

AoD
 
Rose DiManno is not a fan: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/201...weet_about_beachless_sugar_beach_dimanno.html
There is no beach at Sugar Beach.

Beach means waterfront where a person can at least dip a toe. But the signage around Sugar Beach clearly warns that there’s no swimming in these waters at the foot of Lower Jarvis St. As someone who’s actually fallen into Toronto harbour whilst taking sailing lessons — recovery from a cap-sized 15-footer the first thing we were taught — I can vouch that it’s not something you want to do, taking a slimy dip hereabouts.

Sugar Beach is actually a large and expensive sandbox. Pretty and all, with those three dozen “Jackie Kennedy†pink (oy) patio umbrellas — humongous versions of something decorative you’d get in a frothy summer drink — that cost $11,565 a pop, which is a stiff price to pay for whimsical furniture that purports to be landscape art.

I shortly intend to be lying beneath just such a beach umbrella — on the sun-kissed Sicilian coast. Lake Ontario, in its urban port lands stretch, doesn’t much charm, though it’s within my neighborhood. I do, however, like the view from here of rust-hulled lakers off-loading cargo: working ships, offensive to the aesthetes. In one of my many alternative lives, I’m a stevedore. Also far more interesting is the Redpath Sugar refinery, with its chutes and obelisk chimney.

That sugar is industry is commemorated in the nomenclature of Sugar Beach. But, no beach, and no truth in advertising either for on-the-defensive Waterfront Toronto, which is what its officials have been since Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong winkled out the price tag — after four years of trying — from the hugely haughty agency that has spent $14.1 million on this Sugar Un-Beach park wedged between the sugar plant and a monstrous development.

I’m with Minnan-Wong and the penny-pinching Fords on this. Too much to pay for whimsy and durability — the umbrella poles sturdier than the washing line poles that my late father cement-poured into the backyard decades ago, designed to withstand a nuclear bomb. These umbrellas and their braces can withstand winter gale-force winds (and all-season vandalism) but who the heck is going to be sheltering under the parasols November through March? Summer lasts maybe two months in Toronto, which is why the only real purpose for an urban deck is somewhere to banish the smokers year-round (as they might also be banished from bar patios in the near future if the Nico-Nazis get their way, as they inevitably do.)

It feels weird throwing my lot in with the likes of Ford & Ford, at least in the narrow matter of Sugar Beach. Because I am most emphatically not a Philistine who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. No anal bean-counting here. Nor am I, to borrow a colleague’s language on this subject, an “angry... disengaged ... uninterested ... bored ... dumb ... cynical ... intellectually lazy ... city-hater.â€

I live downtown, a five-minute walk from Sugar Beach. I grew up downtown, in the days when escaping summer heat meant running through the sprinklers, the big pool at Christie Pits, a day at the Sunnyside Park “seashore†— a once-gorgeous facility so hideously ignored by the city — or a Sunday family outing to Cherry Beach.
The cottage years came much later. And if the city had asked, or provided for a couple of excavators and a flat-bed truck for transporting purpose, I could have dug up a hunk of rock to match the two “candy-striped†massifs that have been planted at Sugar Beach — to the tune, yowza, of $529,800. For a couple of rocks. Rock bling. More expensive than Carrara marble, mamma mia.

Can’t wait for the first liability suit against the city when some kid clambers atop one of the rocks and cracks her head open.

See, this is why even the non-Ford Nation types voted for RoFo last time around — because they responded to his crusade against wasteful spending. Justifying Sugar Park’s preposterous tab by boxing critics about the ears, framing this wedge of waterfront revitalization as urban art that the rest of us are too ignorant to appreciate, is profoundly condescending and bound to get up a lot of people’s noses.

I look at these designer umbrellas and think: A co-commission for arts students from OCAD and engineering students from U of T could probably have done just as well for a ton less money, though I wouldn’t begrudge them the amount spent if Waterfront Toronto was actually acting as some kind of art patron for blossoming talent.
Can’t fit the dumb-as-a-bag-of-rocks humpback-whale rocks bill into any reasonable spec, however.

Defenders of Sugar Beach and other “transformative†undertakings on Toronto’s woebegone waterfront contend that these projects have spawned nearly $2.6 billion in private development projects in the East Bayfront and West Don Lands neighborhoods.
That’s the part that really makes me see ... not pink but red.

Does nobody remember when city hall politicians, widely and rightly blasted for the cock-up they made in permitting over-development of the Harbourfront strip, particularly the construction of those ugly-as-spit condo buildings marching alongside the Gardiner, promised that never again would they allow concrete condo-towers to be built on the south side of Queens Quay? Not just because height cut off the city from its lakefront but also because the well-heeled haves should not have posh location access simply because they could afford it.

Yet that’s what we’ve got now, flanking Sugar Beach, with those Pier 27 condos rising from the shoreline — directly across the street from the Star building, though corner-office managers may still have their lake view — and the Aqualina Bayside condos near Lower Sherbourne ready to begin construction within a few months.

Do not — DO NOT — dare compare this lakeside patchwork space to Chicago’s exquisite esplanade on Lake Michigan, as Waterfront Toronto’s director of parks, design and construction attempted to do recently. Chicago’s waterfront has a century of enlightened urban design behind it: from serene to spectacular, an ambling and cycling string of interconnected parks, dotted with museums and gardens and sports fields, enhanced by an utterly justifiable tab for the smack-downtown Loop area Millennium Park.
At the heart of Millennium Park is “The Egg,†sometimes called “The Bean,†but formally named “Cloud Gate†— a massive, wondrous piece of mercury-inspired public art, designed by Indian-born Anish Kapoor. The Egg reflects image-warping views of Chicago’s skyline. Enchanted visitors can walk around and under it.
Final cost: $23 million.
Even the Philistines agree: Worth every penny.
Click to expand...
 
I know many love sugar beach - I like it too. It is transformative for the area. But $12K for a single umbrealla for any reason is still exobitant. I renovated my entire bathroom for 1/3 of the price including labour. I also spent 2 weeks visiting Europe for a quarter of that. We can't simply ignore the need to make sure if the money is well spent just because the end result is fantastic.

And I agree with DiManno. Sugar beach is nice and pretty, but compared to the real world class design of Chicago's waterfront, the entire Toronto waterfront is really not the same league. There are probably 3 leagues in between.
 
ksun said:
I know many love sugar beach - I like it too. It is transformative for the area. But $12K for a single umbrealla for any reason is still exobitant. I renovated my entire bathroom for 1/3 of the price including labour. I also spent 2 weeks visiting Europe for a quarter of that. We can't simply ignore the need to make sure if the money is well spent just because the end result is fantastic.

And I agree with DiManno. Sugar beach is nice and pretty, but compared to the real world class design of Chicago's waterfront, the entire Toronto waterfront is really not the same league. There are probably 3 leagues in between.
Click to expand...

It cost $500 for a new outlet to be installed in my laundry closet for my new washer/dryer combo. I don't get why people like yourself don't understand that the cost of professionally installed, designed, and industrial strength product for public use is quite high. You can't do these things on the cheap. The cost included foundations, electrical work, installation of the umbrellas, delivery, testing, refining, materials, work hours, equipment to lift the pieces, and a whole bunch of other costs that add up quickly.

Its not like you can purchase these in a store and install them in a few minutes. This isn't Ikea. Its the public realm. Things cost more.
 
Given the cost of a signalled intersection, those umbrellas are completely reasonable, IMO. Especially since they are designed to withstand time and outdoor conditions, and public use.
 
Agreed. I would rather the umbrellas be done right the first time and last several years, enduring all sorts of brutal environmental conditions, than have to repeatedly replace, several times over, cheap, low-specc'd crap that was ostensibly chosen to save "the taxpayer."
 
Last edited:
Lenser said:
Agreed. I would rather the umbrellas be done right the first time and last several years, enduring all sorts of brual environmental conditions, than have to repeatedly replacem several times over, cheap, low-specc'd crap that was ostensibly chosen to save "the taxpayer."
Click to expand...

HtO Park is a perfectly good example. A third of the cost for those umbrellas, and they already look rusty, damaged and worn out. The Sugar Beach umbrellas still look new, nearly 3 years later. You get what you pay for, and that applies to everything in life.
 
The great thing about the Ford - Minnan-Wong style of economy is that anyone can play. Peeved that a new development blocks the view of the water that you've had from your office for the last twenty years? Well, your dissatisfaction is justified because that development is the doing of those people who wasted that money on the thing that could have been done for pennies by your nephew after school. Like, it's common sense, right?

I don't know if Sugar Beach is worth the money or not. I don't know if the Bean in Chicago is worth the cash it cost. Some people had work, some numbers changed places in the ledgers, something that didn't exist before now exists and people seem to enjoy the results. I always struck by the cost of the least institutional building relative to the cost of a house, even with house prices now inflated and unaffordable for many. But I'm sure there's some reason for it other than the people responsible just like to throw money away.
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top