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Re: NPS redesign competition

From Cathy Nasmith's Built Heritage News #96 (listserv)


10. Nathan Phillips Square – Revell’s is the Entry to Beat
Catherine Nasmith


Hovering over the four schemes for Nathan Phillips Square is the one to beat, the original by Viljo Revell. There seems to be no clear winner or favorite among the entrants, lots of great ideas - each scheme having its own strengths and weaknesses in comparison to the original. As required by the competition brief, all entries, are treading very lightly around Revell’s masterwork as they also address its weaknesses.

On March 8 the winner will be announced. Following the Toronto Star poll, Initially the Baird Sampson was the popular favorite, but has been eclipsed by Zeidler moving up from its initial last place position. www.thestar.com/Generic/Article/183774# These two schemes propose the least change. Torontonians like Nathan Phillips Square, and clearly want only minimal adjustments. How will the jury vote?

The green edges of Revell’s design were the areas where the most radical surgery was proposed by all the entrants, and to varying degrees change was proposed to the colonnade/walkway, and roof deck. Three of the four schemes proposed moving the peace garden out to the west. The Baird Sampson scheme’s most interesting move is the continuation of the ceremonial ramp back down to the raised landscape area on the west. Plant architects offered the brilliant stage as staircase to the western edge.

The least popular scheme proposes the biggest change. New Yorker’s Rogers Marvel dramatically introduces a large sweeping forest landscape on the western edge, which also serves to cover all of the new facilities, tidily eliminating the challenge of introducing competing architectural elements to the existing, but also destroying the existing plaza’s rectilinear counterpoint to Revell’s curves. Rogers Marvel were the one team that chose to leave the Peace Garden in place. The other three schemes preserved the square’s geometry and edges, but struggle to find a compatible architecture.

Given the City’s financial challenges it seems unlikely that any of the projects will move ahead in the near future. That would be in keeping with the original competitions for new City Hall, which took almost forty years to materialize from the time the Toronto Civic Arts League first identified this as a location for a future City Hall and civic square. The original “fifth†entry may win by default, perhaps with modest adjustments and more enlightened management of the space than has been evident over the past few years.

What needs to happen is a clear and properly financed decision. Limbo pending fundraising would continue the degraded state the square is in.
 
Re: NPS redesign competition

The article is correct in that Revell's design was the best, but its his original design with the 2 pools, tall walkways and unobstructed square space that are better, not the compromise that was built and eventually cluttered up.

If the status quo was ok, we wouldn't be having this discussion and this competition. Plenty is wrong with the square and most of the proposals deal with these problems in a creative and modern way.

I'm crossing my fingers for Zeilder but I'd be happy with all but the Rogers proposal.

I specially like how Zeidler opens up the view into the square from Queen St. by glassing the sides of the walkway.

As for money for this, 16M has already been allocated so I see no reason why we won't see construction begin sometime in the fall of this year.
 
Re: NPS redesign competition

Honourable jurors, prepare to be judged
JOHN BARBER

Good morning, esteemed jurors. I hope you all slept well last night and are mentally prepared for the momentous decision that faces you today. It won't be easy to select a winning scheme for the rehabilitation of our sacred Nathan Phillips Square. To such ample and generous minds as yours, each of the four designs before you now will appear to have merits. You have the city's sympathy as you undertake the important public service of choosing just one.

This is just a friendly reminder that if you make the wrong choice, you will ruin our city -- and risk riding home on a rail.

Not to be harsh, but a fatal army now surrounds the bubble of your final deliberations. The architects have cunningly arranged for wrong choices to be easily accessible to you, even seductive. The nattering nabobs of negativity are silently sharpening their scalpels. The people are excitable. In short, harshness happens.

The difficulty here, as so often with individuals, is that the best scheme appears delicate and retiring while the worst one jumps and shouts.

New York architects Rogers Marvel, working with San Francisco landscapist Ken Smith, have gained the greatest attention with the boldest, simplest gesture of the competition: a huge green hill bulging into the square from the west. It's a daring land grab that decisively addresses the commonest complaint about the square, that it has too much concrete.

What makes the scheme bold is that it is so aggressively, unashamedly suburban. Rather than elaborating architect Viljo Revell's consummately urbane vision of an enclosed, hard-edged city square, the Rogers Marvel scheme buries it. The scheme is a classic expression of the contrarian suburban ideal -- rus in urbe -- right down to the ugly, unresolved details one has come to expect when such a thing is put into practice.

The western edge of the great green hill, addressing neighbouring Osgoode Hall, appears to be an unrelieved concrete retaining wall at least two metres tall and more than 100 metres long. Maybe there will be ivy on it. Or maybe there will be RV hookups. Whatever the intention behind the prison-wall western edge of the Rogers Marvel design, it couldn't be cruder.

If only it were as easy to praise the best scheme, submitted by Toronto's Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, as it is to dis the worst. No bold statements leap out of the delicate drawings and the complex model that explains this finalist. Instead, it reads initially as a clever assemblage of details. But careful attention reveals it to be a masterly orchestration that promises to transform the square dramatically by extending and completing Mr. Revell's original, never fully realized vision.

I admit it took me some time to get over the new pavilions the Baird scheme uses to replace and enlarge the Soviet-style pillbox that currently serves as snack bar and skate rental. After all it was George Baird, as dean of architecture at the University of Toronto, who made such a fuss at the prospect of redesigning the square -- saying loudly and influentially it should be "curated," not redesigned. Yet here he is now, along with colleagues Barry Sampson and Jan Neuert, proposing major interventions.

But the new pavilions are beautiful. Rather than skulking beneath a mound of topsoil laced with load-lightening Styrofoam beads, they proclaim their presence openly, and with much greater assurance than the stiff, recessive structures Toronto's Plant Architect proposed for the same purposes.

The Baird scheme's most dramatic intervention is a new overhead walkway that juts off the greened roof of city hall's two-storey base to connect with the existing walkway that defines the western edge of the square. It acts like an arm around the shoulder of the sprawling space, pulling it together, while simultaneously helping to reinvent the chopped-up walkway system as a continuous, upper-level promenade. No other team dealt so skillfully with the competition's greatest challenge. Rather than merely providing access to a currently barren upper level, the Baird scheme makes it a real place, integral to the whole.

Thank you for your attention to the vox populi, esteemed jurors. Your job will be easier now.

jbarber@globeandmail.com
 
Re: NPS redesign competition

Will there be free food at the announcement? I'm heading over ...
 
Re: NPS redesign competition

just walked out of socialist hall (opps sorry i mean City Hall) after the anouncement of the winner (Plant).........all I can say is........:rolleyes :rolleyes :rolleyes
 
Re: NPS redesign competition

What's new? Toronto goes for bland once again. When will this city start caring. Marvel's was easily the most attractive.
 
Re: NPS redesign competition

I like some aspects of Plant like the grand stairs, the boardwalk walkways and the Revell cafe on the podium... but Plant makes little use of the Western edge which I was hoping would be the focus of something spectacular like Zeidler proposed.

I guess the western side will be left for future generations to improve on.
 
Are they planning on putting down new tiles in the square or are they sticking with those ugly concrete blocks?
 
Mystery:

I don't think any of the schemes pondered replacing the concrete plaza.

AoD
 
Darkstar:

Ditto! In this instance, I am quite glad the jury selected one of the more restrained and thoughtful schemes.

AoD
 
One of the major parts of this scheme is the reopening of tower observation deck overlooking the square:

npspai_observation_6.jpg
 
Metro:

Thanks for the link - i've visited the PLANT website before and the plans weren't there.

AoD
 
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