A woman walks down a street straight to the bakery. The bricks and railings of an apartment building rise to her left. another building on the right scatters the sun from white awnings. Two men sit and talk under the shade of a ginkgo tree. And as he walks past the playground, he might not notice the tall towers standing at a sharp angle in the background. This is the vision for 2150 Lake Shore Blvd. W., a 28-acre neighborhood being planned in suburban Toronto’s Etobicoke area. It will accommodate approximately 13,000 people. Offices and retail will employ 4,500 people and there will be new schools, parks and community centres. But the design, led by prominent London architects Allies and Morrison, is all about the little things. It suggests that if you focus on how one part will feel at ground level – and execute the design with persistence – the rest will take care of itself. The project will fill a site on Toronto’s west waterfront formerly occupied by a Mr. Christie cookie factory and now owned by developers First Capital and Pemberton. It is surrounded by the Humber Bay Shores neighborhood – a dense, isolated cluster of high-rise apartment towers that has been torn down over the past 30 years. Architects have a specific recipe for shaping their part of the neighborhood. Alfredo Caraballo, managing partner at Allies and Morrison, calls it “the urban graphic.” This comes from 18th-century English aesthetics, which “is a strange place to start,” as Mr. Caraballo acknowledges with a laugh. But it boils down to two simple ideas: that the visual experience of a place is critical, and that irregular things are beautiful. Allies & Morrison/Pamphlet This new zone therefore begins with a generous scattering of parks and plazas, designed by landscape architects from Toronto’s DTAH and London’s Gross/Max. “First come the spaces and then the buildings,” says Mr. Caraballo. “We believe that if we do these parts right, then the neighborhood will work.” These open spaces vary in size and shape and are placed throughout the site with considered randomness. Buildings then frame these open spaces, creating a changing pattern of blocks and corner intersections. Some roads are planned to be up to six meters wide. The design’s central route is a U-shaped street, a “loop of charm,” says Mr. Caraballo, “in which something interesting happens at every corner.” This connects the large park, retail, offices and homes to a rebuilt GO Transit station and TTC streetcar terminal. In the middle of the loop, a diverse collection of buildings frame an outdoor “gallery” of retail and co-working space. Allies & Morrison/Pamphlet The first phase of the buildings, for which Allies and Morrison have been hired as design architects, reveals the design’s studied pseudo-randomness. In one block there are towers of 9, 11 and 46 floors. of the other 10, 13, 66. That adds up to more than 1,300 homes – 10 per cent of them below-market rentals – 29,000 sq m of office and 6,500 sq m of retail. The constructions flank two public squares. Such decisions about buildings and blocks are the purview of urban planning, a field that lies between the professions of architecture, landscape architecture and planning. Mr. Caraballo’s “graphic” harkens back to the British townscape movement of the 1940s. Townscape proponents were deeply disturbed by the broad strokes of modernist design and car-oriented suburbia. Their response was to emulate the haphazard, gradual character of pre-industrial European cities. Mr. Caraballo sums up the ethos: “The block is not just a diagram that you impose on the site,” he says. “The shape of the city is shaped by the experience of a person moving through it.” Allies & Morrison/Pamphlet This perspective is a far cry from North American urban planning practice, and certainly Toronto. Recent condos in Humber Bay Shores reflect the kind of blocks Toronto planners generally want to see: straight “pedestals” flanking straight, wide streets. But the details are all wrong. The landscape design is lousy. The retail and restaurant spaces here should bring life to the street, but they don’t. The large windows facing the street are largely covered and the ground floor facades lack the detail, texture and variety that make a good street. Both the ideas and the execution are flawed. Project 2150 will be completely different. “It’s happening with every rule we’ve created in Toronto, but in the best possible way,” says Cyndi Rottenberg-Walker, a partner at urban planning and design firm Urban Strategies who is working on the project. “And to their credit, city planning has been very supportive.” It shows the high-low, big-small rhythm of the architecture and the irregular street plan. But the architectural detail will be just as important. “A lot of work went into how these buildings join the ground,” says Mr. Caraballo. “How do we integrate a food store? How do we make inputs readable? The architecture is diverse, because this is a part of the city. We don’t want all buildings to look the same.” Only in the first phase, the architectural materials include different colors of bricks. red concrete that looks like Victorian sandstone. a glass and steel greenhouse-like grocery store. and an entire building clad in peanut green concrete. “We aim to make design practical,” says Mr. Caraballo, “but also to bring enjoyment.” Allies & Morrison/Pamphlet Of course, a project like this is much more than its appearance. Its design was a multi-year process by the developers, with a parallel effort by the city. Among the issues is the combination of housing and other uses. public amenities; the construction and design of transit infrastructure; and the road network. A new “relief road” will divert traffic from the adjacent Gardiner Expressway along the edge of the site and out of the area. This “will allow Lake Shore Boulevard to become the main thoroughfare it was meant to be,” Ms. Rottenberg-Walker says, and allow the new 2150 neighborhood to have relatively few cars in its center. All these infrastructure and financing issues are complex, but they are the meat of any major development. In fast-growing Toronto, the development industry – and city planners – know a lot about how to deal with these things. What they don’t know how to do is create a new neighborhood that is a good place. This requires a diversity of people and activities, yes. But it also needs carefully detailed and varied architecture. wide variety of buildings. and a public realm full of people, commerce, nooks and crannies. And surprises. But these qualities require creativity, time and money. Sometimes, developers will start with a grand vision and then hire local unambitious local architects to water it down. In this case, the continued presence of Allies and Morrison bodes well. “We know that architecture and thoughtful urban planning are fundamental to creating a thriving neighborhood,” says First Capital Vice President Jennifer Arezes, “and we look forward to continuing our partnership” with Allies and Morrison. We’ll see. Equally important: Will city officials accept the unusual street design and layout of buildings? Already some of the streets and squares seem to be a little too wide. City standards will push to be broader. Toronto’s urban design codebook generally produces poor results. With luck, this project could help rewrite the rules. His recipe – sensitive architecture, a relentless focus on ground level and just a hint of disorder – could help shape the city of the future. Find out what’s new on Canadian stages from Globe theater critic J. Kelly Nestruck in the weekly Nestruck on Theater newsletter. Sign up today.
