A
AlvinofDiaspar
Guest
From the Star, by Hume:
Join us at the wrecker's ball
Aug. 20, 2006. 07:48 AM
CHRISTOPHER HUME
The problem isn't that Toronto tears down so many buildings, but that it tears down the wrong buildings.
Instead of destroying the good stuff, which is in short supply, we should be ridding ourselves of architectural blight, of which there is plenty.
Rather than tearing down landmarks such as the recently disappeared Inn on the Park, the soon-to-be-gone half-round building at Bridgepoint Health (formerly Riverdale Hospital), and the former Bata Shoe Headquarters, not to mention Walnut Hall, the last remaining row of Georgian townhouses in Toronto, which is being demolished by neglect, why not take the wrecking ball to, say, the Holiday Inn on King St. W., the depressing Sheraton Centre across from City Hall, the dreary slabs at Eglinton and Yonge, the three Huang & Danczkay condos on Queens Quay W., Dragon City at Spadina and Dundas, the painfully kitschy New York Towers at Bayview and Highway 401, the bunker-like Metro Convention Centre, even that monument to mediocrity, First Canadian Place?We haven't even mentioned the high-rise residential heaps at the north end of Scarborough, the slick banality of Mississauga, those proudly ordinary commercial and condo towers (and condos) in North York, the mess that is south Etobicoke, or sad, desolate St. James Town.
There's so much the city would be better off without. Some buildings were poorly designed by architects who tried but failed; others by architects who clearly didn't care. Their failure goes beyond questions of taste and aesthetics; these are the buildings that deaden the street, blot the skyline, and suck the life out of the city.
"It's fair to say that the development industry hasn't always reached appropriate standards of design," says Toronto mayor David Miller. "We've seen horrible examples of development in this city, St. James Town, for example. I believe in the public realm. This is close to my heart. The only way we're going to make this happen is by taking leadership."
As Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara, who this year was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's Gold Medal, says, "Every building implies a vision of the city, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Every work of building and architecture is engaged in the act of making the public realm, but a lot of people aren't aware of that. Most developers think of the outside surfaces of their buildings as a way of marketing their buildings. But the outside surfaces of a building are the inside surfaces of the public realm. Great urban architecture really does understand that it's part of something larger."
The big mistake, Kuwabara says, is in not concentrating on what happens on the ground floor, where the building meets the street.
"Architects here may be competent at the level of putting up buildings that don't leak, but they don't all share a commitment to the values of urban architecture, the rhythm, texture, grain, materials and typologies," he says. "Architecture has been objectified as a product to be sold and marketed. We need better education and a few good examples. As (Italian architect) Renzo Piano always says, what we're after is coherence."
Of course, mediocre architecture is something even the most beautiful city must deal with. Paris and Barcelona have their duds, but not enough to create a critical mass of banality, the kind that threatens to overwhelm poor Toronto at almost every corner.
That's not to say the city should be a work of art. As Jane Jacobs pointed out in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, we're better served when it isn't. More than anything, what makes a city beautiful is consistency and clarity. New York, which has more than its share of bad buildings, is nonetheless successful as an urban fabric. The landscape also has enough architectural landmarks to carry the heavy load of banality.
In most of Europe, strict planning regimes have brought an extraordinary sense of coherence to cities. Built-form regulations governing height, massing, materials and placement mean that whole blocks read as single elements.
By contrast, North American planning rules fixate more on use than form. They are also driven by political expediency and a powerful development industry. In Toronto, the combination has had deadly effects. The power of the development industry here, and Ontario, is formidable. It sets the agenda despite the objections of many municipal councillors, but more often with their approval.
Developers should know better, as should architects and city planners, but we have provided them with a wide comfort zone within which they can operate without regard to quality. Indeed, during the 1990s, the province systematically removed any reference to aesthetic considerations from the Planning Act. Instead, we rely on formulas of density and coverage.
Is it any wonder that builders have felt so little pressure to look beyond the minimum legal requirements and their own bottom line? It doesn't help that, since the 1950s, in its rush to embrace the future, the city has lost  or set aside  its sense of excellence. We forgot about niceties such as architectural quality, enduring materials, intelligent planning and civic pride; nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of growth.
There are exceptions, however, such as Toronto's Howard Cohen, president of Context Development, and Julie di Lorenzo, president of Diamante, both recognized for the high quality of their work.
According to Cohen, "There's no climate in Toronto that would encourage excellence. Excellence is never held out as an objective. You just have to go to some of the community council meetings to see what I mean. I remember one when (a Toronto-East York) community councillor held up the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (on College St.) because a neighbour from a few blocks away didn't like it... There was no discussion about the quality of design, which is superb, no applause for the U of T for doing something exceptionally good. All the politicians cared about was that a neighbour didn't like it."
(Incidentally, the Donnelly building, designed by Behnisch Architects of Frankfurt and architectsAlliance of Toronto, has won many awards, most recently the RIBA Prize.)
"This kind of thing happens all the time," Cohen laments. "It's the culture of city hall. Municipal politicians are so vulnerable to ratepayers. They have to be pretty gutsy to promote good design rather than usual concerns of height, traffic and the not in my backyard syndrome."
Di Lorenzo agrees: "Why do we have councillors making decisions about planning and architecture?" she asks. "That's ridiculous. I won't have some politician tell me what my building should look like. We're concentrating on the wrong things. As a city we should be focusing on building science and materials. That would lead into the environmental agenda. We need standards for good quality bricks, windows, things like that. And then let the architects be creative. We've fallen way behind. The Europeans are laughing at us."
The irony is that it's precisely a desire for excellence that would enable one city to stand out above the rest. As we head into the most urbanized century yet, the need for cities to stand out grows greater than ever.
Toronto, many fear, is fast falling victim to its own success: Air quality declines, sprawl continues unabated, gridlock grows worse, and public transit remains woefully inadequate. In short, we are setting the stage for a future dystopia.
The ugliness of our architecture is both a symptom and a symbol of the problem.
The kind of planning regulations imposed by cities as diverse as Berlin and Vancouver don't apply in Toronto. In Vancouver, developers must present their proposals to a 12-member design review panel before they receive municipal approval. The panel, made up of volunteer professionals, judges projects from many viewpoints, including architectural quality, sensitivity to context, and even materials. Once the design panel says yes, the scheme goes before a three-member approval board comprised entirely of civic bureaucrats.
Developers are also expected to makes serious contributions to the public realm and even to public housing. In fact, 20 per cent of residential units in Vancouver must be subsidized housing. In most cases, they are indistinguishable from full-market units.
At no point are politicians involved. This is the key to Vancouver's success. City councillors make the rules but public servants apply them. That goes a long way to eliminating the kind of political interference routinely practised in Toronto and other Ontario cities.
"The Vancouver model is commendable," Miller agrees. "It's true, local residents and politicians have a say (in Toronto). I think they should. I think we can use the lesson of Vancouver, but in a Toronto context. Though people tend to forget it, council as whole tends to take a citywide view."
Yet problems of political interference persist. That was highlighted recently when the mayor of Hamilton, Larry Di Ianni, was charged with 41 counts of illegal fundraising under the Municipal Elections Act.
According to local Hamilton activist Joanna Chapman, who spent $30,000 of her own money documenting the mayor's campaign contributions, "The bulk of over-contributions to the mayor came from the development industry. The development industry in Hamilton targeted a number of councillors and the mayor, and put a lot of money into their campaigns."
And so Toronto and Hamilton end up with buildings that take as much as they can from the urban context and give nothing back. Among the worst examples are the Hudson's Bay Centre, which fails completely to address  let alone celebrate  the unique conditions of Bloor and Yonge, one of Toronto's major shopping streets; the Sheraton Centre, which although it occupies a major site across the road from City Hall could be anywhere in the world; and the disconnected and dispiriting complex of apartment buildings at St. James Town.
We have no design review panel (except now on the waterfront) to turn down buildings that add nothing to the city. (The Transition Team, created to oversee civic amalgamation in 1997, recommended the appointment of a City Architect. That suggestion was never adopted.)
As for heritage, the situation is equally critical. Though the Ontario Heritage Act was amended last year to give municipalities more power to designate historic sites and stop their demolition, it remains inadequate. That was made clear last month when the city forced the owner of Walnut Hall, Toronto developer Joe Jonatan, to erect a fence around the Shuter St. property. Jonatan has let the building deteriorate for a decade; it has reached the point where it is literally falling down.
In July, regulations were introduced to allow the city to fine Jonatan and stop "demolition by neglect," but they won't be ready until the fall.
The case of the Inn on the Park, a '60s landmark designed by pioneering Modernist architect Peter Dickinson, is just as disturbing. It was destroyed the day before North York Community Council was set to vote on whether to designate the building as a heritage site.
The argument used to justify this act of vandalism was that the property would become a car dealership that will employ several hundred people.
Torontonians talk about wanting a city that ranks with the best, but we are unwilling to enact the tough measures required to achieve that status. This shouldn't be surprising; after all, despite almost two decades of debate, we still haven't figured out what to do with our garbage! Instead of political leadership, we have political followship.
"The Vancouver model is 100 per cent better than what we have," di Lorenzo argues. "Like Vancouver, we should have councillors-at-large. The nonsense won't stop until we get rid of the ward system in Toronto. Nobody here cares about the city; all they worry about is their own little territory."
They say we get the leaders we deserve. The same goes for buildings.
AoD
Join us at the wrecker's ball
Aug. 20, 2006. 07:48 AM
CHRISTOPHER HUME
The problem isn't that Toronto tears down so many buildings, but that it tears down the wrong buildings.
Instead of destroying the good stuff, which is in short supply, we should be ridding ourselves of architectural blight, of which there is plenty.
Rather than tearing down landmarks such as the recently disappeared Inn on the Park, the soon-to-be-gone half-round building at Bridgepoint Health (formerly Riverdale Hospital), and the former Bata Shoe Headquarters, not to mention Walnut Hall, the last remaining row of Georgian townhouses in Toronto, which is being demolished by neglect, why not take the wrecking ball to, say, the Holiday Inn on King St. W., the depressing Sheraton Centre across from City Hall, the dreary slabs at Eglinton and Yonge, the three Huang & Danczkay condos on Queens Quay W., Dragon City at Spadina and Dundas, the painfully kitschy New York Towers at Bayview and Highway 401, the bunker-like Metro Convention Centre, even that monument to mediocrity, First Canadian Place?We haven't even mentioned the high-rise residential heaps at the north end of Scarborough, the slick banality of Mississauga, those proudly ordinary commercial and condo towers (and condos) in North York, the mess that is south Etobicoke, or sad, desolate St. James Town.
There's so much the city would be better off without. Some buildings were poorly designed by architects who tried but failed; others by architects who clearly didn't care. Their failure goes beyond questions of taste and aesthetics; these are the buildings that deaden the street, blot the skyline, and suck the life out of the city.
"It's fair to say that the development industry hasn't always reached appropriate standards of design," says Toronto mayor David Miller. "We've seen horrible examples of development in this city, St. James Town, for example. I believe in the public realm. This is close to my heart. The only way we're going to make this happen is by taking leadership."
As Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara, who this year was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's Gold Medal, says, "Every building implies a vision of the city, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Every work of building and architecture is engaged in the act of making the public realm, but a lot of people aren't aware of that. Most developers think of the outside surfaces of their buildings as a way of marketing their buildings. But the outside surfaces of a building are the inside surfaces of the public realm. Great urban architecture really does understand that it's part of something larger."
The big mistake, Kuwabara says, is in not concentrating on what happens on the ground floor, where the building meets the street.
"Architects here may be competent at the level of putting up buildings that don't leak, but they don't all share a commitment to the values of urban architecture, the rhythm, texture, grain, materials and typologies," he says. "Architecture has been objectified as a product to be sold and marketed. We need better education and a few good examples. As (Italian architect) Renzo Piano always says, what we're after is coherence."
Of course, mediocre architecture is something even the most beautiful city must deal with. Paris and Barcelona have their duds, but not enough to create a critical mass of banality, the kind that threatens to overwhelm poor Toronto at almost every corner.
That's not to say the city should be a work of art. As Jane Jacobs pointed out in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, we're better served when it isn't. More than anything, what makes a city beautiful is consistency and clarity. New York, which has more than its share of bad buildings, is nonetheless successful as an urban fabric. The landscape also has enough architectural landmarks to carry the heavy load of banality.
In most of Europe, strict planning regimes have brought an extraordinary sense of coherence to cities. Built-form regulations governing height, massing, materials and placement mean that whole blocks read as single elements.
By contrast, North American planning rules fixate more on use than form. They are also driven by political expediency and a powerful development industry. In Toronto, the combination has had deadly effects. The power of the development industry here, and Ontario, is formidable. It sets the agenda despite the objections of many municipal councillors, but more often with their approval.
Developers should know better, as should architects and city planners, but we have provided them with a wide comfort zone within which they can operate without regard to quality. Indeed, during the 1990s, the province systematically removed any reference to aesthetic considerations from the Planning Act. Instead, we rely on formulas of density and coverage.
Is it any wonder that builders have felt so little pressure to look beyond the minimum legal requirements and their own bottom line? It doesn't help that, since the 1950s, in its rush to embrace the future, the city has lost  or set aside  its sense of excellence. We forgot about niceties such as architectural quality, enduring materials, intelligent planning and civic pride; nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of growth.
There are exceptions, however, such as Toronto's Howard Cohen, president of Context Development, and Julie di Lorenzo, president of Diamante, both recognized for the high quality of their work.
According to Cohen, "There's no climate in Toronto that would encourage excellence. Excellence is never held out as an objective. You just have to go to some of the community council meetings to see what I mean. I remember one when (a Toronto-East York) community councillor held up the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (on College St.) because a neighbour from a few blocks away didn't like it... There was no discussion about the quality of design, which is superb, no applause for the U of T for doing something exceptionally good. All the politicians cared about was that a neighbour didn't like it."
(Incidentally, the Donnelly building, designed by Behnisch Architects of Frankfurt and architectsAlliance of Toronto, has won many awards, most recently the RIBA Prize.)
"This kind of thing happens all the time," Cohen laments. "It's the culture of city hall. Municipal politicians are so vulnerable to ratepayers. They have to be pretty gutsy to promote good design rather than usual concerns of height, traffic and the not in my backyard syndrome."
Di Lorenzo agrees: "Why do we have councillors making decisions about planning and architecture?" she asks. "That's ridiculous. I won't have some politician tell me what my building should look like. We're concentrating on the wrong things. As a city we should be focusing on building science and materials. That would lead into the environmental agenda. We need standards for good quality bricks, windows, things like that. And then let the architects be creative. We've fallen way behind. The Europeans are laughing at us."
The irony is that it's precisely a desire for excellence that would enable one city to stand out above the rest. As we head into the most urbanized century yet, the need for cities to stand out grows greater than ever.
Toronto, many fear, is fast falling victim to its own success: Air quality declines, sprawl continues unabated, gridlock grows worse, and public transit remains woefully inadequate. In short, we are setting the stage for a future dystopia.
The ugliness of our architecture is both a symptom and a symbol of the problem.
The kind of planning regulations imposed by cities as diverse as Berlin and Vancouver don't apply in Toronto. In Vancouver, developers must present their proposals to a 12-member design review panel before they receive municipal approval. The panel, made up of volunteer professionals, judges projects from many viewpoints, including architectural quality, sensitivity to context, and even materials. Once the design panel says yes, the scheme goes before a three-member approval board comprised entirely of civic bureaucrats.
Developers are also expected to makes serious contributions to the public realm and even to public housing. In fact, 20 per cent of residential units in Vancouver must be subsidized housing. In most cases, they are indistinguishable from full-market units.
At no point are politicians involved. This is the key to Vancouver's success. City councillors make the rules but public servants apply them. That goes a long way to eliminating the kind of political interference routinely practised in Toronto and other Ontario cities.
"The Vancouver model is commendable," Miller agrees. "It's true, local residents and politicians have a say (in Toronto). I think they should. I think we can use the lesson of Vancouver, but in a Toronto context. Though people tend to forget it, council as whole tends to take a citywide view."
Yet problems of political interference persist. That was highlighted recently when the mayor of Hamilton, Larry Di Ianni, was charged with 41 counts of illegal fundraising under the Municipal Elections Act.
According to local Hamilton activist Joanna Chapman, who spent $30,000 of her own money documenting the mayor's campaign contributions, "The bulk of over-contributions to the mayor came from the development industry. The development industry in Hamilton targeted a number of councillors and the mayor, and put a lot of money into their campaigns."
And so Toronto and Hamilton end up with buildings that take as much as they can from the urban context and give nothing back. Among the worst examples are the Hudson's Bay Centre, which fails completely to address  let alone celebrate  the unique conditions of Bloor and Yonge, one of Toronto's major shopping streets; the Sheraton Centre, which although it occupies a major site across the road from City Hall could be anywhere in the world; and the disconnected and dispiriting complex of apartment buildings at St. James Town.
We have no design review panel (except now on the waterfront) to turn down buildings that add nothing to the city. (The Transition Team, created to oversee civic amalgamation in 1997, recommended the appointment of a City Architect. That suggestion was never adopted.)
As for heritage, the situation is equally critical. Though the Ontario Heritage Act was amended last year to give municipalities more power to designate historic sites and stop their demolition, it remains inadequate. That was made clear last month when the city forced the owner of Walnut Hall, Toronto developer Joe Jonatan, to erect a fence around the Shuter St. property. Jonatan has let the building deteriorate for a decade; it has reached the point where it is literally falling down.
In July, regulations were introduced to allow the city to fine Jonatan and stop "demolition by neglect," but they won't be ready until the fall.
The case of the Inn on the Park, a '60s landmark designed by pioneering Modernist architect Peter Dickinson, is just as disturbing. It was destroyed the day before North York Community Council was set to vote on whether to designate the building as a heritage site.
The argument used to justify this act of vandalism was that the property would become a car dealership that will employ several hundred people.
Torontonians talk about wanting a city that ranks with the best, but we are unwilling to enact the tough measures required to achieve that status. This shouldn't be surprising; after all, despite almost two decades of debate, we still haven't figured out what to do with our garbage! Instead of political leadership, we have political followship.
"The Vancouver model is 100 per cent better than what we have," di Lorenzo argues. "Like Vancouver, we should have councillors-at-large. The nonsense won't stop until we get rid of the ward system in Toronto. Nobody here cares about the city; all they worry about is their own little territory."
They say we get the leaders we deserve. The same goes for buildings.
AoD