Toronto envisions “water rooms” in Port Lands development

An international group of planners rethinks how the city’s industrial waterfront should mature. Toronto residents are getting excited about the idea of creating “water rooms” on underused land between the Canadian city’s downtown and nearby Lake Ontario. When six teams of architects and planners were invited to present concepts for the city’s Port Lands, two of them — led by prominent local architect A.J. Diamond and Parisian architect Antoine Grumbach — suggested outdoor places wrapping around bodies of water. Diamond, a renowned figure in Toronto architectural circles, argued that government officials would be making a big mistake if they continued moving toward establishing extensive open green space near the lake. “What we need is a man-made water’s edge, protected by buildings and animated by shops, cafés, and places of entertainment, not a green desert,” he charged. The lake, said Diamond, “is the open space.” He and others insisted that buildings in the Port Lands should form narrow, intimate spaces along the water’s edge, as they do in cities like Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Venice. Diamond proposed constructing an open-air market area, wrapped by buildings, on the Parliament Street pier. Similarly, Grumbach, teaming up with Urban Strategies of Toronto, suggested that buildings form “water rooms” along the Ship Channel, open to the sky and to the passage of ships. The invited designers — two teams led by Canadians, two led by designers from the US, and two led by Europeans — were each asked by the city and the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation to present ideas for a different part of the Port Lands. Encompassing more than 1,000 acres (over 400 hectares) mostly of landfill, the site is described by Toronto urban design chief Robert Freedman as “the largest undeveloped waterfront in any North American city.” Officials had been envisioning a large park in the site’s center. Grumbach objected, saying that a better approach would be to intensify development and place a much smaller, more urban park at its center. He argued that the proper area to be preserved and enhanced as natural green space was the Don River valley, a corridor with many trees, which runs to the lake. Toronto urban designer Ken Greenberg, working with the local Architects Alliance, emphasized the importance of “adding new layers to the industrial and maritime heritage” of the waterfront, not eliminating vestiges of the past. Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh, teaming with John Ellis of Solomon ETC of San Francisco and Toronto architect Joe Lobko, proposed a neighborhood with four-story residential buildings at Cherry Beach, rather than the high-rise buildings that conventional developers might put at that location, between the Shipping Channel and the band of islands and beaches of the outer harbor. Paul Ostergaard of UDA said the lower density at the beach should taper upward to mid- and high-rise residential buildings elsewhere. He recommended organizing much of the housing around public squares and canals. Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat suggested that the elevated Gar-diner Expressway, which some Toronto residents want to pull down, could be a setting for interesting new building types, such as a structure suspended from the highway’s underside. Like many of the other participants, Von Egeraat argued that artifacts of the old industrial port are assets that add to the area’s appeal. Boston architect Fred Koetter said the Port Lands, when redeveloped, should have a variegated character, “unpredictable, intense in some places, calm in others.” The next step is to undertake more detailed work known as “precinct planning,” according to Lorne Cappe, senior urban designer in Toronto’s Department of City Planning. A big question is the extent to which the six teams’ refreshing ideas will displace the concepts that had already been progressing in government offices.