arts and culture : Development News

The preliminary results of the latest public consultation on the subject of sidewalk cafes makes it look as though we in Toronto may be on the verge of fully accepting our urbanity.

“We’ve heard from pretty much everybody that patios make streets vibrant and are an important part of our culture,” says Chris Ronson, the City of Toronto’s project manager in charge of outdoor cafe design guidelines.

In addition, the City of Toronto heard that people want them to reduce what they see as “over-regulation” of patio operators, and create more flexibility for them. “We’ve been suggesting that more cafe types are a good idea, that they can be closer to the curbside, or on a curb lane, occupying parking spots on the road. We’ve had really positive response to that.”

There have been some complaints, mostly about certain patios leaving too little sidewalk room for crowds, or people with various mobility problems, to get comfortably past. Ronson pointed out examples on the Danforth that leave as little as 1.1 metres between patio and road, when even residential sidewalks average between 1.5 and 1.7 metres in width. The city standard for commercial strips is 2.1 metres, which is roughly the amount of space required for two wheelchairs to pass each other.

The consultation, a joint project between the transportation department, which occupies itself with design, and Municipal Licensing and Standards, which handles behavioural guidelines, is also floating the idea of extending the closing time for patios.

Looks like Toronto's growing into the big city it's become, after all. 


Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Chris Ronson

The city now has a street named for a living, gay man.

It may be a global first. But we don’t actually know if it’s even a Toronto first, because the city doesn’t keep track of such things.

But whether it’s a first or not (according to city officials, Toronto has permitted street namings for living people since 2013), it’s certainly a cause for celebration.

Sky Gilbert is the 61-year-old writer of more than two dozen plays and five novels and co-founder of Buddies in Bad Times theatre, a mainstay of LGBTQ theatre in the city for 36 years.

The lane named for him runs beside the theatre.

Gilbert was born in Connecticut and now lives in Hamilton and teaches at the University of Guelph. He has been known for decades for expressing strong and often unpopular opinions related to sex, sexuality and theatre. A recent post on his blog, for instance, lists 10 things wrong with audiences at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, including “They are fat,” “They are ugly,” “They don’t know how to raise their children,” and “They have no idea what David Mirvish has done for them.”

Gilbert’s forthrightness has often been mistaken for egoism. It’s worth noting that there’s no mention on his blog of the street now named after him.

According to Bruce McPherson, the city’s manager of surveys, Gilbert’s name was put forwad by the Church Wellesley Neighbourhood Association.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Bruce McPherson, Lyne Kyle

If anyone knows of any other streets or laneways in the city named for LGBTQ people, please let us know, and we'll amend the above story to record and reflect.

This is what Tom Ryaboi thinks: “One area I think all cities can improve on is how they use the tops of their buildings. Toronto has recently implemented a green roof bylaw, I think this is a good start. Most buildings that I have been to still don't do anything productive with their roof.”

He’s not an urban planner, or an eco-activist or architect. But he’s got a perspective few can boast, and one he’s spent his short career trying to share.

He’s a high-rise photographer.

This doesn’t mean he takes pictures of high-rises, though with all the developer bucks being made in this city over the past decade and more, there’s a possibility that might be more profitable. Tom -- who was born in Vaughan, spent his 20s in the Annex and has never lived in a high-rise -- takes pictures from high-rises, looking out, and down.

“While I was filming City Rising,” he says, referring to his four-minute and 14-second 2012 film, “I would often sit on a roof for many hours while the camera was time-lapsing and I would ponder things.”

His point of view is reflected in his photography, which was recently on display as part of a promotion for the Canary District development, and much of which is readiy viewable on his website.

Perspective is often hard to come by in a city changing as profoundly and as rapidly as this one has been recently. It’s often difficult to do it justice in words. But Ryaboi’s images - contemplative, vertiginous, triumphal, beautiful — offer just that: views from a city that didn’t exist a decade ago, and glimpses of the city that will exist a century from now.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Tom Ryaboi

The city has three new murals thanks to Mural Routes, a little-known non-profit that uses the creation of outdoor art to mentor and engage communities.

Two of them are the physical manifestations of a new city project, which they’ve called Cultural Hot Spot, according to which they’ll be naming a succession of under-appreciated parts of town as hot spots to draw attention to what’s already happening there, as well as encourage and in some cases under-write new initiatives.

The first was east and south Scarborough, and the murals shepherded by Mural Routes,  are as close to the gateways of this area as they could manage. One is at the junction of Kingston Road and the Danforth, the other on Old Kingston Road facing east, just west of the village strip.

“When the organization started, initially the intention was to take the art our of the galleries and put them onto the street for those people who are not comfortable going into galleries or are not familiar or comfortable with different forms of art,” says Karin Eaton, spokeswoman for Mural Routes. “In the beginning, it was filling the blank walls with art, and it became more of a sharing program so we actually like to share all the information we’ve learned so we’ve become a hub for information and resource gathering about murals.”

The mural at Kingston Road and Danforth, unveiled two weeks ago, is the result of a competition won by established mural artist Bill Wrigley (responsible for well-known murals across the city, including at By the Way Cafe and The Senator). The easternmost one was a more communal effort, created in conjunction with the Morningside Library’s introduction to mural art program.

In addition to these, the most recent one, just unveiled, is by the artist known as Media, at Woodbine and Gerard.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Karin Eaton

Some of the more interesting employment opportunities we've spotted this week include:

Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, a non-profit devoted to preserving Ontario's Greenbelt, an area surrounding the Golden Horseshoe, is hiring a research and policy analyst. As the title suggests, the role involves significant amounts of research, though there's a major outreach component as well. Specific requirements include presenting one's finding to interested parties and engaging with a variety of government and non-government organizations.

The SickKids Foundation has two new openings this week.

First, they're seeking an associate graphic designer. The position requires three to five years of experience in digital marketing or communications, and will see that the person that takes on this position help the non-profit with its fundraising initiatives on behalf of Sick Kids Hospital.

Second, the foundation is seeking to hire an associate events director. The role has a significant emphasis on building and mentoring a team, as well as building new and existing events. This position requires five to seven years in a related leadership role.

On the culture side, Canada's National Ballet School is hiring a digital media co-ordinator. The role involves creating audiovisual material that will help with the school's promotional, marketing and educational needs. Three-plus years of related media experience is a requirement for this position, as well as expertise with programs such as Sony Vegas and DVD Architect.

Finally, the National Reading Campaign is looking for someone to join its board of directors as an executive director. Much of the role involves working with a volunteer board (though this position is paid), and managing the campaign's initiatives. Candidates living in Toronto are preferred, though those living outside of the city with an exceptional skill set will also be considered.


Do you know of a job opportunity with an innovative company or organization? Let us know!  

It can sometimes seem that all of Toronto is a cultural hotspot of some description. From Dundas Square to the Ossington Strip, King West to Leslieville, things seem to be forever percolating.

But the city of Toronto wanted to systematize it, and in the process perhaps expand our notion of what, and more importantly where, a cultural hotspot could be.

So, on the recommendation of the city's Creative Capital Gains report, community cultural co-ordinator Andrea Raymond-Wong and others are establishing what she is calling "a rotating cultural hotspot in the city of Toronto," enabling the city and its citizens to focus on art, culture, and community.

The first of them is in South Scarborough.

"In part, it's about celebrating and marketing some of the things that are already happening," Raymond-Wong says. "There's already a wealth of creativity happening in Scarborough. There's a philharmonic orchestra, and you've got a lot of local businesses, it's a neighbourhood of strip malls, a lot of independent businesses, and there are a lot of green spaces."

Note the mention of strip malls as a positive. This bodes well for the program.

Launched May 2, the program has a budget of about $150,000 for each hotspot, in addition to what Raymond-Wong refers to as $200,000 worth of leverage from partners and sponsors.

In Scarborough, the initiative includes the creation of two gateway murals by Mural Roots, art in storefronts in the Crossroads-Danforth BIA by Kalpna Patel, a writing program for seniors that will result in a published anthology of their work and the Next Project, which aims through talks, workshops and other programs to foster the talent of the next generation of Scarborough artists.

The program runs until October, at which point Raymond-Wong says it will rotate to somewhere in Etobicoke.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Andrea Raymond-Wong

There's a big, new WiFi-friendly cafe in town.

In a city with a less ambivalent relationship with its cafe patrons this would not be news.

In cafe cities, from Paris to Astana, from Sofia to Calcutta, there is an understanding that a significant part of a cafe's natural clientele are lingerers, people who read, talk, meet people, and even use a laptop in a cafe, outsourcing their own living room to the city at large, choosing to live in public, in the city, rather than holed up in private property.

Toronto didn't have cafes by any regular definition of the term until recently. It had coffee shops and doughnut shops. Perhaps as a result, the notion of lingering in public became associated with indigence, which has given cafe owners the idea that it's OK to hustle people along.

Many cafes have done this in various ways over the years, by posting notices with time limits, but offering free WiFi, but only for 30 minutes and, most recently, by covering over electrical outlets to ward off people with electrical devices, telling them they should be in an office, or at home, or anywhere other than in the cafe.

It's an odd way to treat your natural clientele.

But Stone Yu, son of the family that owns two cafe bakeries in Markham and Richmond Hill, figured it might be a good idea to be inviting, rather than censorious. Hence, the new 6,400 square foot Lucullus on Elm Street.

Downstairs, there are Chinese buns and other baked and prepared foods starting at about $1.60. There are a couple of tables up front, and an outlet or two. But it's upstairs that should gladden the hearts of residents-in-public space city-wide.

"The second floor is designed as a space to relax," Yu says. "We have free WiFi and outlets for laptops."

It sounds simple. But a cafe with ample space that does not consider people who would like to spend time there as table hogs is a rarity, making Lucullus on Elm the sort of place Future Bakery was for the pre-laptop era, before it decided not to extend to its 21st-century customers the same courtesy it once did for its analog chess-playing patrons, blocking off their one electric outlet.

Chinese bakeries have not, traditionally, been trendsetters in Toronto, but with pastry geting ever more artisinal and gluten-free, and electrical outlets being boarded up – or not installed – across the city, perhaps they should be.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Stone Yu

As of last week, Toronto’s got a new attraction. The Bloor Street Cultural Corridor calls attention to a strip that before now didn’t have much of an identity.

The corridor runs from Bay to Bathurst, and as corridor director and Royal Conservatory director of marketing Heather Kelly pointed out at L’espresso on Wednesday, it includes a dozen arts and culture spots for Torontonians and tourists to take in.

"This is a new type of collaboration," Councillor Michael Thompson said to the packed house, referring to the collaboration among the dozen to promote the area as a whole.

"I've travelled to 60 cities," said Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, whose ward covers the eastern part of the corridor, "and I know when you visit a city, you don’t go for the skyscrapers, for the condos."

From east to west, the BSCC consists of the Japan Foundation, the Gardiner Museum, the ROM, the Bata Shoe Museum, the Royal Conservatory and Koerner Hall, the Istituto Itlaiano di Cultura, the Alliance Française, the Native Canadian Centre,  the Miles Nadal Jewishj Communtiy Centre, Trinity-St. Paul’s with its Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Toronto Consort, and the Bloor Cinema.

"By working collaboratively and cooperatively," their press release said, "the cultural organizations intend to attract more Torontonians, tourists, and attention to the Bloor Street Culture Corridor. Helping visitors connect the dots, the initiative will increase awareness of how close together and easy to access these arts and entertainment experiences really are. The partnering organizations hope to entice people to stay in the area longer and ultimately include more destinations in their visit."

There are also two hotels in the strip — the Intercontinental and the Holiday Inn — and a couple of dozen restaurants, bars and cafes. It’s not necessarily the best restaurant strip, nor the best part of town for cafes, but there is no other part of town with as much of a mix.

In addition to the brochure, which will be made available to various tourism outfits, they’ve set up a website to bring it all together.

If it achieves nothing else, the initiative reminds us that there’s plenty to do and see around Bloor and Spadina.

Writer: Bert Archer

Ryerson’s got a new architectural gallery.

Designed by Gow Hastings Architects, the small (3,150 square foot) space occupies an old storage area just off the main entrance of Canadian master architect Ron Thom’s Department of Architectural Science at 325 Church Street.

“The brief was to provide a flexible gallery space to mount a wide range of changing exhibitions," partner Valerie Gow says. "It was to provide a new learning space for the architectural students and simultaneously connect the public and architectural community to the building."

Built for $465,000, work on the Paul H. Cocker Gallery was begun in the summer of 2012. It’s most striking features are its three oversized glass pivot doors, and the thin white floor tile that serves to distinguish the space from the rest of the building’s lobby, and also doubles as a potential display space.

Gow Hastings specializes in educational spaces, and had renovated studios and offices in the Thom building before this latest commission.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Valerie Gow

Pop-up shops tend to pop-up and pop back down again just as quickly, but Brika popped, stayed, and expanded.

Founded by Jen Lee Koss and Kena Paranjape as an online seller of "craft, elevated" in December, 2012, Brika popped up into the offline world in October in a 300 square foot space the two negotiated in the basement of The Bay on Queen Street in exchange for a cut of the revenues.

Brika is part of a stream of pop-ups popping up around the city, especially around West Queen West and the East Danforth, taking advantage of neighbourhoods intransition, where old shops are closing, but new boutiques haven't yet found the confidence -- or the cash -- to move in permanently.

"We knew we wanted to pop-up somewhere," says Koss, an Oxford-educated former investment manager, "and we had discussions with various retailers." Ultimately, The Bay ended up being the best fit.

Though the online end features objects designed and made all over the world, the shop is all-Canadian, with about 80 per cent being from Ontario, and a good deal from Toronto itself, like a set of wooden cufflinks with stags or anchors burned into them by Vancouver’s Valerie Thai.

After a successful holiday season, they decided to stick around a little longer, and doubled their size.

Koss says it’s not permanent, though, explaining that despite good foot traffic, they don’t plan to stay past Mother’s Day, which can be a sort of second Christmas for the woman-oriented business. Many small, typically online retailers are opting for similar options, choosing pop-ups as an alternative to the conventional brick-and-mortar building. 

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jen Lee Koss

It seemed an unlikely addition to the mix at the time, but Aroma is quickly finding its place in Toronto’s evolving coffee ecosystem.

It started out in 2007 with a single shop on the northwest corner of Bloor an Albany, an intersection already populated by both a Second Cup and a Starbucks, with a Tim Hortons a block away and one of the city’s most established independent cafes just two blocks east.

In the early months, you were as likely to hear Hebrew as English at the tables, but soon people started coming who didn’t know it from trips to Israel, where Aroma is the No. 1 chain, with about 150 locations, and the unlikely addition survived.

"When you do have other coffee shops in the area, it does mean the market exist," says operating partner Anat Davidzon, explaining the company’s lion’s-den strategy, "and the question becomes whether or not you can shift people’s purchasing behaviour."

With their breakfast and lunch menu, along with bread baked on site, and confections new to the Toronto scene like the dulce de leche cookies called alfajores, people's behaviour did shift sufficiently to prompt a second opening about two years later. And now, seven years in, a new one is popping up every couple of months, for a current total of 18 Aromas in Toronto, two in Vaughan, and plans for 10 more across the Golden Horseshoe – an area roughly the size of Israel – by the end of 2014. Their first Little Italy location just opened, and the next on in the pipeline is at the MaRS building at College and University.

Though you might have expected the chain to open in an area with strong connections to Israel – some place like Lawrence and Bathurst, for instance – Davidzon says the business plan was ambitious, and with a relatively small Israeli and Jewish population in the city, if the first shop couldn’t survive in a more typical part of town, it wouldn’t survive in the long run at all.

A franchise operation, each of the 20 locations has an owner-operator, working under the master franchiser, which bought the Canadian rights but is otherwise wholly separate from the Israeli company.

Canada has the second highest number of locations after Israel, and ahead of the US. Aroma also operates in Kazakhstan, Romania and Ukraine.

After MaRS, the company – with its head office in Forest Hill – has plans to open four more locations in Toronto this year, and another six across the GTA and as far as Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Daniel Davidzon, Anat Davidzon

A discussion among three architects and a community organizer managed, if just for a morning, to shift the focus away from condos toward what architecture can do for the city and its people, and how.

Janna Levitt, Marianne McKenna, and Michael McLelland joined Rosalyn Morrison of the Toronto Community Foundation to discuss various ways architecture and architects can contribute to the city’s social health.

"We're a firm about ideas," said Marianne McKenna, the "M" in KPMB. "How do we restore our position in society as advocates?"

"Other people make things," said McLelland of ERA Architects, picking up the theme. "Architects, like artists, are generally about ideas. Part of that means solving complex problems. I don’t love anything better than a fantastic problem."

And though some of those problems are problems of design, many of them aren’t. Levitt, of LGA Architectural Partners, spoke of her firm's work helping non-profit clients raise funds to get their project done. McKenna spoke of working with Manitoba Hydro on their zero-footprint building in Winnipeg to ensure the 3,000 newly consolidated employees would both benefit and integrate into their new neighbourhood by leaving out any cafeteria space, ensuring a large new client base for cafes and restaurants in the area.

The talk was hosted by the Design Exchange and sponsored by Shimmerman Penn accountants.

Writer: Bert Archer

Space and time are all well and good, but they’re not the most human of concepts.

Toronto architect David Sisam, principal with Montgomery Sisam, prefers "place and occasion," the title of a wide-ranging talk he’s giving on Thursday as part of Ryerson’s architecture series.

The concept comes from the late Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck, who said, "Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion."

To illustrate, Sisam’s talk will cover four concepts basic to his firm's philosophy, using their Toronto-area projects to hammer the message home. The topics, which are also the titles of essays in a 2013 monograph on his firm, are "Light and Air," "Economy of Means, Generosity of Ends," "Transcending Expectations," and "The Space Between."

By "light and air," Sisam means the integration of indoor and outdoor space, "We do a lot of healthcare work," he says, giving the John C. and Sally Horsfall Eaton Ambulatory Care Centre on Cummer Avenue as an instance, "where the floor plates are very big, and we try to make them narrower to give more access to daylight and view."

Limited budgets are to architecture firms, in Sisam’s view what sonnets are to poets: a limitation that tests the mettle and can bring out some of the best work. "It's a rigorous exercise to stretch a limited budget to produce something of worth," he says, describing what he means by "economy of means" and "generosity of ends," and offering the Island Yacht Club and Greenwood College School as examples.

"When you get a programme for a building," Sisam says, referring to the technicalities of an assignment or brief from a client, "you get something called gross-up: corridors, duct shafts, and so on, space which s typically regarded as something the client wants to reduce, but which is actually an important part of the program. Corridors can become galleries, and so on,” he says. “In planning, public space are planned first, and the buildings are filled in later. With buildings, it’s often the opposite."

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Sisam will talk about the relationship between any given building and the place it’s built, a relationship that’s defined, in his view, by 'the space in between," whether it's in a city, like his firm’s Humber River bicycle and pedestrian bridge, or on a riverbank in the countryside.

The talk is at 6:30pm in Pitman Hall at 160 Mutual Street on the Ryerson campus.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: David Sisam
Photos: Tom Arban, courtesy of Montgomery Sisam Architects.

The City of Hamilton's decided it needs a place to house all its relocated Toronto artists, so starting this week, they’ll be moving into some of the most affordable downtown lofts in the GTA and Golden Horseshoe.

Construction was completed on 95 King--previously a strip club called Bannister’s--in November, and the first tenants started moving in Feb. 1.

The 150-year-old building with a 1923 façade has been many things over the years. Architect Bill Curran, whose firm Thier and Curran designed the project, says it likely started out as a dry good warehouse, evolved into a well-known 1960s night club called Diamond Jim’s, and had been Bannister’s for a couple of decades until it shut down two years ago, since which time the building’s been vacant.

"Because it was a dilapidated strip joint, we had to remove a lot of…," Curran paused, until he landed on the mot juste, "… unsympathetic materials and peel back the building to its core. We discovered a lot of problems, things that were concealed behind layers and layers of ceilings and walls."

The idea was to create a building that would be of interest to artists--tenants for both the loft and the studios on the ground floor and basement must supply some proof of being artists--while offering monthly rents low enough to suit their budgets. The result is 12 lofts between 550 and 750 square feet, all with en suite laundry and high-grade finishes, for $800-$1,000 a month.

The rent is subsidized by the developer, the City of Hamilton, who figured they’d kill two birds with one stone by renovating a blighted downtown building while inviting the sorts of people Richard Florida and others think can give urban centres a kickstart.

Their and Curran, specialists in residential architecture, is also the firm behind an affordable housing project just beginning construction now in Richmond Hill.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Bill Curran

As anyone who looks at Toronto's new skyline will be able to tell you, architects are not what they used to be.

"Architects used to be a profession that was all encompassing, from the broadest formal and aesthetic things down to technical details," says Alex Bozikovic, the Globe and Mail’s new architecture critic. "Architects are no longer in the driver seats, even on projects where their input is valued."

Architects are now just members of committees, Bozikovic says, along with developers, engineers, and often whole groups of consultants on things like acoustics and lighting. Though we praise or blame the architect when the building is complete, she can be as much a victim of circumstance as we bystanders.

Understandably, students of architecture are concerned. Which is why the master's degree class of 2015 has organized a rather nifty talk, not on the future of architecture but on the future of architects, which Bozikovic will moderate.

Speakers include practitioners and teachers from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and U of T, as well as Jonathan Mallie, a principal at Shop. Bozikovic is especially impressed with how Shop put together the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

"The façade is a very complicated series curving steel panels," he says. "These were made in a shop somewhere else, fabricated using digital specs that Shop created. Each panel was given a specific ID and they were able to track production and delivery using an iPhone app Shop built for this purpose."

By pursuing such avenues, Bozikovic thinks architects may be able to get back the care that used to go into every aspect of a building, from plaster work to pilasters, while maintaining the efficiencies created by the current Mechano-set system of mass-produced modules being put together in limited numbers of ways across increasingly generic buildings.

"The current era in architectural design is a real paradigm shift," says Lee-Ann Pallett, the lead student organizer of the symposium. "I think that really not since architects came into power has such a paradigm shift occurred. The advent of digital technologies is affecting not only the delivery of materials but the organization of firms. They’re creating a change in the industry, which is something we want to discuss from a critical standpoint."

The symposium, which is aimed at students and building professionals, will take place on Tuesday, Jan. 28 at the Design Exchange from 6:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Writer: Bert Archer
Sources: Alex Bozikovic and Lee-Ann Pallett