Arts and Culture : Development News

Three of six finalists in the competition to design Canada's Holocaust monument in Ottawa are from Toronto.
 
The shortlist was announced last week, and among entries from Vancouver, Montreal and Massachusetts are proposals from Quadrangle Architects, as well as teams led by museum planner Gail Lord and art historian and curator Irene Szylinger. There were 74 submissions in total.
 
The monument, in whatever form it takes, will be going up at the corner of Booth and Wellington streets, near the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
 
The Toronto finalists were forbidden from talking to the media about their designs, but the ministries of Canadian Heritage and Foreign Affairs did release the names of all the members of each team. Szylinger’s team includes artists and architect Ron Arad, and Lord’s includes architect Daniel Libeskind and photographer Edward Burtynsky.
 
The shortlist was decided by a jury of art and design professionals, someone from the National Holocaust Monument Development Council, and a Holocaust survivor.

The winning design for the $8-million monument will be announced next winter. Len Westerberg, a spokesman for Canadian Heritage, says there will be a public exhibition of the finalists before the winner is announced.
 
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Len Westerberg

The city put up a blog last week that will let us keep track of how its so-called Heritage Conservation Districts (HCDs) are coming along.
 
Maintained by the city’s Heritage Preservation Services (HPS), part of the Planning Division, the blog provides background information as well as updates on the five parts of the city currently under consideration for the designation, covering about 2,000 properties.
 
The districts are King and Spadina, “historic” Yonge Street, the Garden District (a fancy, newfangled name for the area between Allen Gardens and Moss Park), St. Lawrence and Queen Street East.
 
"The purpose of the HCD study is to determine if the area warrants designation as a HCD and to develop a full understanding of what makes it significant and a valued part of the city," says Scott Barrett, senior co-ordinator with the HPS, in the blog’s welcome post.

"The plan phase develops and implements policies and guidelines for conserving the valued character and sense of place that exists within the district, and to welcome the type of new development that fits in and benefits a HCD. A plan is adopted by bylaw when a district is designated."
 
The blog will also function as a public feedback tool.
 
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Scott Barrett

Construction has begun on the building that will house the new Globe and Mail offices, among others, on King Street East.

"We're now underway," says David Gerofsky, president of First Gulf, the commercial real estate arm of Great Gulf Homes, of which he's CEO. "Foundation, excavation and shoring will begin cirtually immediately, and it will be continuous construction for the next three years for completion in the spring of 2016."

The new 500,000 square foot glass tower, a curtain-wall construction, was designed by Diamond and Schmitt. There will be four levels of underground parking and a raised floor system that allows for the heating and ventilation system to be installed underfloor. A boon to Globe journos and possibly to smokers, there will also be 20,000 square feet of terraces.

The site contained the foundation of one of Toronto’s oldest houses, built in 1794, the year after the city was founded. Artefacts were found on the construction site, which Gerofsky says will become part of a display, possibly in the building's lobby.

The construction budget for the building is about $250 million.

Gerofsky says the buildings other major tenant has been signed and will be announced as early as this week.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: David Gerofsky

Our skyline is being defined for a generation, probably several, and it looks like Toronto’s decided it’s got a heart of glass.

But before the cult of mirrored and transparent rectilinearity bedazzled our pragmatic developers and their pet architects, Toronto allowed itself to show a little detail, some of which is on display at the Market Gallery’s show of the city’s Art Deco and Style Moderne history.

"Art Deco was a great escape route for designers coming of age during and after the First World War,"  says Alec Keefer, president of the Toronto Architectural Conservancy, which is putting on the show. "Those, like Alfred Chapman, J. J. Woolnough and Martin Baldwin, were looking for an approach that was daring and muscular. Art Deco and its successor Style Moderne allowed them to rid themselves of the cult and sophisticated trappings of classical elegant restraint that epitomized the Anglo-British school, full of conceits and mannerisms that was then the norm."

The exhibition, which opened on Saturday and runs until Jan. 25 on the second floor of St. Lawrence Market, is a good opportunity to get in touch with the burst of development Toronto experienced in the 1920s and 30s, much of which has since been replaced.

It's also a chance to think more general thoughts about Toronto's sense of self and place, leading viewers to look for themselves into other eras. Keefer has one, in particular, he'd like to see more attention paid to.

"In the decade immediate preceding the First World War," he says, "under the National Economic Policy there was a true explosion in the construction of factories, commercial lofts, and  warehouses. These over engineered beauties are one our greatest cultural and economic assets. They can if successfully managed be one of the truly economic generators, employing a work force even greater than when they were first opened."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Alec Keefer

If the name hadn’t already been taken, Toronto might have been known as the Grey Lady. Even the recent flourish of condo development has added little to the city's palette.
 
This is where Street Art comes in.
 
For the past two years, this tiny sub-section of the city's transportation division has been underwriting murals all around town. Its latest, a two-sided piece by Ian Leventhal in the Mt Pleasant underpass at Bloor, is due to be finished next week. Another of his works is visible to motor commuters just off Bathurst Street at the 401.
 
"People are finally starting to notice the art around the city," says the program's manager, Lilie Zendel. The 22-storey mural of a Phoenix on 200 Wellesley, the apartment building that suffered the hoarding-related fire last year, is probably helping out on that front. (There’s talk that one may end up being the world’s highest, though it has some competition from the 70m high piece by German artist Hendrik Beikirch in Busan, South Korea.)
 
"We're trying to encourage walking," Zendel says, "and one of the ways you do that is to improve public space." She says they took some inspiration from Philadelphia’s 30-year-old mural program that started out as a graffiti prevention initiative and grew into itself over the years.
 
In addition to subsidizing and orchestrating these murals–it pays no more than 70 per cent of the cost--Street Art has put up an artist directory to help business owners commission their own pieces if they like.
 
The latest program, to be announced shortly, is called Outside the Box, for which they’ve hired two artists to create wraps for traffic light boxes, from which the city spends an inordinate amount of money each year removing tags and other graffiti.
 
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Lilie Zendel

It turns out, One Spadina Crescent, the big 19th-century building Spadina curves around just north of College, was never completed.

The University of Toronto School of Architecture is going to change that.

The school's Dean, Richard Sommer, announced this morning that U.S. architect Nader Tehrani has designed an addition to the north side of the building, which will be built in conjunction with thoroughgoing renovations to prepare the building to be the new premises for the expanding architecture school, the country’s oldest.

"It's one of those early buildings in the history of the city, like Upper Canada College or the provincial legislature, that was a kind of a frontal building, positioned to face the lake," Sommer says.

"It was a U-shaped building, what we call in architecture single-loaded. The north end of the site was never developed, and over time it just got filled in with stuff. Before it was even [the] Knox Theological Seminary and later college, it was built as a prospect for wealthy landowners. That was the original function of that circle. Then the seminary took over and had a building facing south."

Sommer says there have been a number of additions added haphazardly to the north of the building over the years, which will be demolished.

"The project is part of making design and city-building front-and-centre for the city of Toronto," he says.

John Daniels, of developer the Daniels Corporation, and his wife Myrna have given another $10 million towards the project, in addition to the $14 million the couple gave in 2008 that triggered the renaming of the architecture school in his name.

Daniels graduated from the school of architecture in 1950.

"I would compare the Daniels benefaction to what Alfred Taubman gave to the University of Michigan more than a decade ago, and which completely transformed its prospects," Sommer says.

Some excavation of hazardous materials has already been done, and Sommer hopes that if the rest of the fundraising goes well, the entire project will be completed within three years.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Richard Sommer

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Artscape has a novel way of getting artists into studio spaces.

With its latest project, Young Place, 80 per cent of the 75,000 square feet of disused schoolhouse will be rented, and 20 per cent of it will be sold according to a scheme based on the Options for Homes model.

"The spaces were valued at $430 a square foot by an appraiser, and we provide prospective owners with a 25 per cent down payment interest- and payment-free," says Tim Jones, Artscape’s president and CEO. But unlike Options for Homes, Artscape retains that 25 per cent ownership, so when the original buyer sells, the next buyer will get the same deal.

When it opens in September, Young Place, located at 180 Shaw Street between Dundas and Queen, will be Artscape’s biggest, though at $16 million to renovate that old Givens Shaw Public School, it is only roughly half as expensive as the Daniels Spectrum in Regent Park.

Young Place, named for funder the Michael Young Family Foundation, will open on the old school’s centenary. Getting such an old building into shape to be a modern arts space has been difficult.

"It really is an overhaul of the building," Jones says, "bringing it up to building code, with all its mechanical, electrical and structural issues. It’s an old school, and there’s a reason the school board has such a challenge with all this aging infrastructure."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Tim Jones

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Jump, known in the pre-Plenty of Fish-and-Grindr world as the premier spot for business people to meet each other, has just re-opened after its most extensive renovation in the landmark bar and restaurant’s 20-year history.

The first in the now ubiquitous Oliver and Bonacini chain, Jump opened in 1993 as a hopeful investment in a financial district still smarting from the 1989-90 crash.

"This was one of our smoothest construction jobs," says Theresa Suraci, O&B’s director of marketing and communications. "We shut for a month, which is always a very challenging schedule when you’re doing as much work as we did but I think they ran into very few hiccoughs."

The renovation cost $1 million, which Suraci takes some pleasure in pointing out is what it cost to build the establishment in the first place.

The press release announcing the re-opening describes the new interior as "intimate" with "Cognac-coloured leathers, tones of charcoal grey and warm amber woods."

"We are celebrating 20 years in business," says co-owner Michael Bonacini, who left his job at Centro to join Peter Oliver in the new venture, "and there are certainly times in a restaurant’s life when it needs a little TLC. That said, it’s still the solid bones of Jump. It just needed a facelift to make it feel more current and vibrant. That’s essential in the restaurant industry, especially in the very competitive downtown core.

"Whenever you renovate in a building in the downtown core, you’re dealing with one of the most challenging projects imaginable, given that it directly affects an asset worth millions of dollars.  In this case we’re working around say 5,000 occupants of the building, all affected by things like deliveries, offloading, noise, vibrations and general safety factors. For instance, we needed to core through a concrete slab in order to move a fire hose cabinet, requiring us to x-ray the concrete to assess issues of structural rebar or electrical conduit. The problem is that no one can be within 150 feet at the time the x-ray is taken, which means that due to the close proximity of the escalators and subway below, we had only a couple of hours in the middle of the night to possibly schedule the procedure.  It took us seven days just to coordinate the scheduling. These types of renovations are infinitely complicated."

Jump is located at 18 Wellington Street, just west of Yonge. 

Writer: Bert Archer
Sources: Theresa Suraci, Michael Bonacini

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Ryerson's Department of Architectural Science has set its students the task of coming up with novel ideas about how to get more utility and "civility" out of our city's public spaces.

As part of a course led by Associate Professor George Kapelos, students across the faculty have been put into teams to come up with useful public amenities for 16 subway-proximate spaces around the city, from Berczy Park near King station to a 629 square metre city-owned lot near Lawrence station.

Each design must include 15 elements such as a WiFi hotspot, a weather information post, protected seating and phone charging stations, along with at least five others chosen from a list of 22 options, incuding hot water dispensers, food warming stations and donation collection boxes.

The project is in line with the city's officially expressed desire to do likewise. As Kapelos says in the assignment brief he issued his students, "The City of Toronto is seeking to introduce public facilities on city-owned properties or public spaces adjacent to major transportation interchanges that provide civic amenities to the population of the city." The city has just installed the second of a proposed 20 public toilets as part of its initiative.

Interim results will be on display this afternoon (Jan 9)  between 2 and 4 p.m., and again on Friday after 6 p.m.  The final designs will be on display in the form of posters starting at 6 p.m. on Friday at the school's atrium at 325 Church Street.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Prachi Khandekar

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Google Canada's got some new digs.

As of the middle of last month, Google Canada's Toronto office moved from its rather inauspicious space in the Dundas Square Cineplex building to 89,000 square feet on five floors of a stately Peter Dickinson tower on Richmond Street West, just behind the opera house.

There have for years been stories out of Mountain View, California of Google's wonderful HQ with its over-the-top amenities, ad now, it seems, Google Canada's decided it worth following suit.

I took a tour of the place last week with Aaron Brindle, Google Canada's communications manager. It's not quite finished yet— there are still some cartographically themed graphics to go into some stairwells, and one floor is still entirely unoccupied, though it's fully furnished.

But they do have a DJ room. And a jam room, where employees can use the full complement of instruments and gear to play and even record. Also, there's food—lots of it.

"I don't think any employee is ever more than 150 feet away from food," Brindle said. Walking down the hallways you run into jars of candy, freezers of ice cream, the occasional mini-kitchen, all in addition to the main dining room, where meals prepared by Google's chef are served five days a week.

It's almost as if Google wanted people to have something to write about when they opened.

There are also more obviously productive spaces, like the 42 conference, phone or "huddle" rooms sprinkled about the place.

Carpets are made from salvaged fishnets, and the walls are lined with reclaimed wood, all of which was designed and executed by Google in consultation with HOK.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Aaron Brindle

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Bay street's getting a new fresco next week thanks to Lanterra's taste in public art.

The developer's using its one per cent—the portion of the building costs the city obliges they put aside for public art—for a series of large pieces by Italian artist Sandro Martini.

"We've always sold or projects not just on the units themselves but on the amenities space around it," says Lanterra CEO Barry Fenton.

The glass works, the largest of which is about 150 feet by 100 feet, will occupy a 3,500-square-foot, 50-foot-high retail space in a sort of glass box at street level on the north side of the already colourful Burano condo tower on the east side of the street. Though there's no tenant yet, Fenton figures it'll be a coffee shop or restaurant.

Fenton estimates the cost of the works to be between $500,000 and $600,000. The commission resulted from a public competition Lanterra held in Italy.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Barry Fenton

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Construction has started on the ambitious Fort York Visitors Centre that the city hopes will renew interest in the 17.4-hectare patch of mostly grass where Toronto was born.

The $18-million project has been designed by Vancouver firm Patkau Architects, who are working with Toronto's Kearns Mancini.

"I always tell people, Fort York represents the city's founding landscape," says Karen Black, manager of the city's Museum Services department, "and there aren't many cities that still have right at their core the founding landscape intact. But most people think Fort York consists of the little walled seven-acre site."

In addition to recreating the original shoreline just north of the Gardiner Expressway with its weathered steel facade, the new building will enable the site's administration to move out of the old officers' quarters and school, which in turn will be opened to the public.

Funding for the project has come from the Minister of Tourism, Culture and Sport ($5 million), the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund ($5 million) and there are hopes of raising $6 million privately. One million dollars has already been donated by the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, intended to be spent on the grounds at the north of the property known as Garrison Common, the site of a battlefield from the War of 1812.

Work is expected to take 18 months, with an opening scheduled for April, 2014.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Karen Black

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The $4-million donation for a Regent Park cultural centre from the Daniels Corporation—and the foundation set up by its CEO—is more significant than it may seem on the surface.

"Part of the donation has been to act as a long-term transition fund for the anchor tenants at the facility," says Daniels VP Martin Blake of the centre now known as Daniels Spectrum. "The Regent Park School of Music has now transitioned into this facility. It's a purpose-built facility for them, 2,000 or so square feet. They don't have the means to pay for market rent in the building."

A portion of the $4 million will fund a five-year transition for these tenants, part of a plan to ramp up their own fundraising and income generation to allow the organizations to ultimately pay the market rent themselves.

But perhaps more significantly, none of the donation had anything to do with Section 37, the municipal regulation that trades developer density for community benefits, the source for much of the charitable-seeming work developers do in the city.

Though it's a first for Daniels, which has in the past funnelled its donations to Second Harvest, Habitat for Humanity Canada and the Daniels School of Architecture at the University of Toronto, it may signal a shift in developers sense of economic responsibility to the neighbourhoods they’re making their money in.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Martin Blake

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The formerly peripatetic Theatre Centre is getting a permanent home in an Edwardian library on Queen Street West at Lisgar.

Designed by city architect Robert McCallum in 1909 and funded by Andrew Carnegie, the two-storey brick building's getting a $6.2-million renovation beginning this week that will include a 200-seat performance space, a rehearsal hall and a café, which, in artistic director Franco Boni's opinion, is the most important part.

"The whole idea is that there needs to be a space open to the public," Boni says. "That glass cube at the back, the café, is the most expensive, but I also think it's the most important. Artists will make work, create work and produce work in lots of different kinds of spaces, but the one thing that is so important for a performance space is that we need to create these kinds of meeting places, a third space. We need to be building these spaces and integrating these spaces into our theatres. We can't just be open at seven at night for a show and then cart the audience out. We have to be open all day."

The old building, which has been used as a public health facility in the years since the library closed in 1964, is about 10,000 square feet. After the renovation, which should be finished by next fall, it will be between 13,000 and 14,000 square feet, with the extra space coming mostly from extensions above and to the rear.

The architect is Philip Goldsmith of GBCA, the man behind the Summerhill LCBO.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Franco Boni

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In the midst of the most crowded condo market in the world, David Mirvish has made a bet that Frank Gehry can make his proposal rise above the rest.

That, and the fact that he is proposing the city's first full-blown condo cultural centre, with a major new art museum and a new campus for the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Early skepticism concentrated on the demolition of the Princess of Wales Theatre, which Mirvish built in 1993 to accommodate a production of Miss Saigon. But at a well-attended press conference at the AGO on October 1, Mirvish did a credible job of laying money-grab fears to rest by reminding the crowd that architecture is also an art.

"I do theatre, I do art, and I'm interested in saying who we are as a people through architecture," he said at a podium set up in front of a wall full of sketches and several early models of the proposed two-podium, three-tower proposal. "Having theatres that are not full all the time is not better than having art galleries." The proposed 60,000-square-foot gallery would house Mirvish's private collection.

In a speech that referred to artists Frank Stella (who was in attendance), Ron Davis and Gaudí, Mirvish told the press that he had spent his life travelling, looking at paintings and architecture, making the proposal sound more like an ambitious art project than a development deal. "I am not building condominiums," he said in what has already become the most quotable quote from the announcement. "I am building three sculptures for people to live in."

Gehry spoke after Mirvish, revealing, among other things, that we might have had several more Gehry buildings in Toronto, the architect's native city, but he had been beat out repeatedly in competitions and calls for proposals by Jack Diamond.

These buildings, he said, would "connect to the John Street cultural corridor, which is a great idea. As a kid, I used to go up and down John Street, and to think of it now as a major cultural corridor is exciting. I hope, I pray, it happens."

The proposal will now begin the approvals process, and if everything goes perfectly smoothly, which it rarely does, the towers, between 80 and 85 storeys each according to the current design, would be ready for residents by 2019.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: David Mirvish & Frank Gehry

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