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UrbanToronto is celebrating 20 YEARS throughout October with stories and images looking back over the last two decades. Today we continue our looks back at architecture and planning over the period.
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Heritage Conservation in Toronto
The preservation of Toronto’s built heritage has become a hot topic in recent years. With limited space to build in the city, and with development activity continuing at a rampant pace, properties with existing buildings — particularly in the urban core — are easy targets for redevelopment. Amidst so much rapid change, there is a constant debate around the city’s heritage: what do we preserve, and why?
This is never a clear-cut decision, and indeed our approach to preserving Toronto’s heritage has significantly evolved over the past two decades. The story of heritage preservation is one that weaves government policy, community activism, architecture, urban planning, and socioeconomics into a tangled, complex knot. To gain a better understanding of the issues involved, UrbanToronto spoke with Tamara Anson-Cartwright, Program Manager of Heritage Preservation Services at the City of Toronto, whose work involves many policies guiding heritage preservation in the city.
There are many topics to discuss around heritage, but we have chosen to focus on a select few themes that have had the greatest impact over the past few years and will continue to shape heritage preservation in the years to come.
Standing Strong: Preserving the Built Environment
There are many ways of preserving an existing building, and Toronto has seen them all. Designers are getting more creative in how the existing built form is preserved and integrated into new developments, and these approaches have evolved over the past two decades.
Perhaps the most common form of heritage preservation seen in Toronto is facadism. Facadism refers to the practice of retaining only the facade of a historic building, and integrating it into the new building that replaces it. It is often seen as a compromise between the City and developers as a way to preserve a heritage structure while allowing redevelopment.
There has been considerable debate as to whether facadism is an acceptable approach to heritage preservation, but regardless, there has been a notable evolution in the practice of facadism over the past two decades. Earlier examples, like at One Bedford above, simply saw the main facade of the original building pasted onto the facade of the new building, a near two-dimensional relic of what was there before.
In more recent years, however, there has been a push to preserve multiple facades of a building, or perhaps one structural bay of each facade. This is an attempt to respect the three-dimensional qualities of the original structure, thereby preserving more of its integrity and value, rather than treating the facade as a two-dimensional element that can be transferred onto another structure. Prominent examples where multiple facades or structural bays were retained include the Waterworks Building (above), EY Tower, Loblaws Groceterias, and Jazz Apartments.
Another trend in facadism to note is that more often, facades are being retained in situ, rather than demolished and rebuilt. This can be seen at developments like The United BLDG (below), King Condos, and Concord Sky, where a complex steel framework holds up multi-storey facades while construction of the new towers slowly climbs behind. This is a way to maintain authenticity; often when a facade is dismantled, it is never quite put back together the same way, with modifications made and newer construction techniques used resulting in slight changes to its composition. Retaining a facade in situ guarantees that it is preserved in its original state.
In many cases, the heritage building is kept in its entirety, or a portion of it is retained, and the new building is constructed as an addition. This may even involve relocating a heritage structure in its entirety to accommodate the new development on the site. Additions take on many forms, but in general, current practice focuses on differentiating the old and new, allowing the heritage structure to be expressed as its own volume and not be completely overwhelmed by the new. Some examples include Five St Joseph (below), The Selby, Queen Richmond Centre West (two above), and Pinnacle on Adelaide, where a portion or even the entirety of the original heritage building was preserved and integrated into the new building.
Beyond facadism and additions, adaptive reuse and rehabilitation are employed as ways of breathing new life into old buildings and neighbourhoods. There is an important distinction between the two concepts: rehabilitation involves the renovation of an existing building or neighbourhood that sustains its current use, whereas adaptive reuse takes an existing building or neighbourhood and repurposes it for new uses. Prominent examples of rehabilitation include Union Station (two below), Massey Hall (below), and the Royal Ontario Museum, while prominent examples of adaptive reuse include the Distillery District (six below), the Tower Automotive Building (now home to the MOCA), Wychwood Barns, the Symes Road Destructor, and Evergreen Brick Works (three below).
The approaches of adaptive reuse and rehabilitation are becoming more prominent in contemporary development, as they are seen as successful ways of preserving heritage while integrating new development into cities. There is economic and cultural value in preserving spaces that simply cannot be built the same way in contemporary society, while there is also a large sustainability component, where saving buildings from demolition preserves the embodied carbon of the building materials.
Building Framework: The Impact of Policy
In 2003, while UrbanToronto was coming online, the Standards and Guidelines for the Preservation of Historic Places in Canada was first published, marking a watershed moment for heritage preservation in Canada. The document represents the first time that all three levels of government came together, along with conservation specialists, industry professionals, and community members, to establish a national set of heritage preservation standards that applies to all contexts including buildings, infrastructure, landscapes, and archaeological sites, among others. Referred to in the industry simply as the Standards & Guidelines, this document has provided the foundation on which all heritage preservation projects in the country are based, and has profoundly shaped our approach to heritage over the past two decades.
The Standards & Guidelines presents a comprehensive toolkit for assessing the heritage value of a site that allows professionals to describe the heritage attributes of a property in great detail. Early descriptions of heritage properties were just a paragraph or two long, summarizing the importance of the property while offering general protection over everything contained within. In recent years, however, heritage protections often include itemized lists identifying every component on the property that contributes to its heritage value. This allows for a deeper understanding of the site’s historic significance; however, it can also have the unintended consequence of perceiving a building as parts, some of which can be kept and some of which can be discarded. This approach can perhaps be skewed as preserving pieces of a place rather than the place itself, facadism being a prime example of this. There are many debates about the pros and cons of this mentality, but it is a notable evolution in our approach to heritage preservation in Toronto that has taken place over the past two decades.
Aside from the Standards & Guidelines, there have been many pieces of planning policy and legislation that have been introduced since the turn of the century to strengthen and guide heritage measures in both the province and city. These include significant revisions to the Ontario Heritage Act in 2005, updates to the relevant Provincial Policy Statements in 2005 and 2020, and strong heritage policies included in the City of Toronto’s Official Plan in 2015, among others. This planning framework translates directly into the built environment, and has reshaped heritage preservation in many ways. One such way is giving local communities a much stronger voice in the process.
Heritage preservation has always been deeply rooted in local communities. The modern heritage movement dates back primarily to the 1970s, when communities rallied against the widespread displacement and demolition of entire neighbourhoods to make way for ‘urban renewal’ projects such as highways, transit lines, social housing, and skyscrapers. Famous local examples include the battle to save Trefann Court, spearheaded by John Sewell and successfully won in 1969, and the fight to save the Annex and Chinatown from the Spadina Expressway, famously led by urbanist Jane Jacobs and successfully cancelled in 1971. Several heritage organizations grew from these, and in 1975 the Ontario Heritage Act was introduced, which allowed municipalities to begin affording heritage protections to significant buildings across the city, marking the beginning of the Toronto Heritage Register.
Today, through robust consultations and community engagements, local residents have more of a say in what gets preserved and how. Over the past two decades, the focus on heritage has shifted from a top-down approach dictated by experts and government officials to a more inclusive process, where community involvement is encouraged and directly impacts projects across the city. This in turn has led to greater equity and diversity in heritage preservation, which is more representative of the cultural mosaic that exists in Toronto today.
A great example of this is Heritage Conservation Districts (HCD), a planning tool used in special neighbourhoods which contain a unique heritage character, that allows development to happen within these neighbourhoods in a way that does not detract from their heritage value. HCDs have been around since the 1970s, but they were only enacted when the local community raised enough funds themselves to pay for the study and report — meaning that typically only affluent neighbourhoods were designated. That changed in 2012, when the City of Toronto took on the role of initiating HCDs themselves, which has led to a spate of new districts across the city in more diverse and mixed-use neighbourhoods. The process is still heavily rooted in the local community, with local residents and associations directly involved in the process at every step, and it has now become much more accessible to all residents across the city.
Back to the Future: Where is Heritage Heading?
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its 94 Calls to Action to address the legacy and impacts of Canada’s residential school system and to pave a path forward to reconciliation of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. While we are all familiar with the land acknowledgements that have become commonplace since this report, it is important here to recognize that Toronto’s heritage stretches back thousands of years and includes many generations of Indigenous Peoples who have inhabited these lands. This recognition is now an integral part of Toronto’s heritage policies, and is shaping how heritage preservation is implemented in the city today.
It is also important to note that Indigenous presence in Toronto is not a thing of the past, but that Indigenous Peoples still inhabit this land and their history and culture are still very much alive today. As such, it has become the standard that every HCD and secondary plan produced by City Planning includes consultation with local Indigenous Peoples as well as the inclusion of Indigenous-focused design and policies. Major projects like the Ontario Court of Justice — and the Canary District where and Indigenous Hub is being built (below) — include components that are intended to both honour the history of Indigenous Peoples and also to provide Indigenous spaces for contemporary use. Landscape design and public art are also more focused on recognizing the Indigenous history of the land, with landmarks honouring geographical features such as the original waterfront near present-day Front Street, Toronto’s extensive ravine system, and the Davenport Trail. As Toronto continues to grapple with its colonial past and work toward reconciliation, Indigenous involvement and design will continue to increase and influence heritage preservation in the future.
Another prevalent theme in heritage preservation is sustainability. It is now recognized that demolition is a hugely wasteful undertaking. The concept of embodied carbon — a calculation of the total carbon emissions used to fabricate and install each material of a building — is now able to quantify this waste in a way that relates it directly to the climate crisis. There is a significant push to preserve rather than replace, which is impacting the approach to the adaptive reuse and rehabilitation of existing buildings.
There is also a movement to try and reuse building materials when a building is demolished; rather than throw everything in a landfill, the design and construction industry is increasingly focused on keeping, recycling, reusing, and reconstituting these materials in the new building or elsewhere. In addition to the environmental benefits of these approaches, there are also cases to be made that there are social and economic benefits to preserving or reusing buildings and materials. The conversation around sustainability is leading to more robust and creative approaches to heritage preservation that may see more of our built environment preserved in the future, in one form or another.
One final impact to note that may greatly influence the future of heritage preservation in Toronto is the recent changes enacted by the Government of Ontario in Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act, which came into effect on January 1, 2023. Part of this bill involves significant changes to the Ontario Heritage Act, particularly with regards to municipal heritage registers. Municipalities maintain a Heritage Register which contains a comprehensive list of all properties of historic interest in their city, which affords them protection from demolition at the discretion of City Planning. Before Bill 23, any property added to the Heritage Register was on the list indefinitely unless removed by the City themselves.
Bill 23 now stipulates that a property can only be on a municipal heritage register for a maximum of two years at a time. Further to that, once those two years expire, the property cannot be added back on the heritage register for another five years after that. This means that as of December 2024, over 4,000 properties in Toronto and over 35,000 properties across Ontario will lose their heritage protection. As this is fairly recent, the City has not yet determined how to address this. There is currently a city-wide heritage survey that has been ongoing since 2019, but new planning tools may be needed to afford protection to the thousands of properties currently on the Toronto Heritage Register. It remains to be seen what the next steps will be from the City, but there may be some profound policy adjustments in the near future that may change how heritage preservation is implemented in the years to come.
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UrbanToronto will return tomorrow with another story celebrating 20 YEARS. In the meantime, check back often to our front page and Forum to keep an eye on all the current and emerging trends, and you can always leave your comments in the space below.
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