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Peter Clewes Interview
John Bentley Mays interviewed Peter Clewes in this morning's G & M...
A resounding vote against contextualism
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
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April 18, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
You can't go far in downtown Toronto without running into a tall building by architect Peter Clewes. He is a disciplined mid-career modernist, not (so far) a member of the tribe of avant-garde designers now dotting important North American cities with highly expressive, individualistic towers.
But over the past few years, Mr. Clewes (often in collaboration with his architectsAlliance colleague, the late Adrian DiCastri) has brought inner Hogtown home buyers much more affordable sophistication and intelligent art than we had before his time.
The old Gooderham and Worts distillery site, east of Parliament Street, is the focus of some of Mr. Clewes's most inventive new projects. This cluster of 45 brick buildings is one of North America's best-preserved groups of 19th-century industrial architecture. To transform this isolated place into a neighbourhood, and make it something better than a theme park, the developers who now own it decided, a few years back, to drop condo stacks into the Victorian layout — which is where Mr. Clewes came into the picture.
"The challenge of the site was the insertion of a sufficient amount of density, to revitalize a national historic site," this intense and talented architect told me in a conversation at the old distillery. "Density was needed to provide the financial horsepower to do that. How do you put in between a million and 1.5 million square feet of density in a way that has regard for the way this site is reinventing itself?"
The three towers, and especially the new corridors and intervals they define on the ground, are the architect's answers to this key question.
"They are wraparound buildings that are sculpted," Mr. Clewes said. "There's no deeper idea than that. They are simple, neutral buildings. But for us, what's important is always the spaces between the buildings, instead of the buildings themselves. There is a kind of hierarchy and progression in the spaces around the buildings.
"Trinity Street [which bisects the pedestrian district] is the principal axis. Then there are a series of thin lanes woven through the site, then a series of courts — residual sites between the buildings that can be inhabited. The bases [of the towers] are very open and transparent to allow 'publicness' to happen in a modern way. There isn't an idea of closed buildings. I think it's pretty cool, and it's coming along nicely."
Some years ago, when the Distillery District was under different management, three condominium blocks of a more conventional variety went up in the vicinity. The designers laboured hard to make the facades of these projects fit in among the weathered, attractively worn brick Victorian structures. So why not go along with critics who argue for more of such contextualism, a closer visual match of new buildings to old ones?
"Because they're wrong," Mr. Clewes said. "We need to create buildings of our time. Architecture is a record of where a city and a culture was at a particular time. This precinct is an industrial artifact, a social presence within the culture of Canada. It's important that we not blur the distinctiveness of this precinct, but rather amplify it. The exceptions in the urban framework articulate the city. The [earlier three towers, built before architectsAlliance's involvement] speak of a time in Toronto when people said, 'Let's be apologetic, let's say we're not inserting additional density in this precinct.' This isn't what we should do now."
Of the Distillery District buildings Mr. Clewes has worked on, the last two, especially, have been shortened by command of city officials. The architect has little patience for what he calls Toronto's "visceral reaction against height. It's a neurosis. But this is a very political world, and we have to have regard for that process, then come up with the best architectural solution we can."
At the present time, the most advanced tide of tall-building design is running against the squared-off glass and steel solutions Mr. Clewes and other classic modernists are providing. Many wealthy condo-buyers want glamorous, dramatic signature towers with more striking profiles, and this taste for the ultra is rapidly filtering down to less well-to-do purchasers.
Among his favourite local examples of what he doesn't do is Chinese designer Yansong Ma's sensuously feminine Absolute development in Mississauga, nicknamed "Marilyn." Mr. Clewes recognizes the challenge of such new buildings for architects of his stripe.
"There's the rise of the middle class and the importance of the individual. If you go to the "Marilyn" towers, you see they come from the desire of the middle class to be recognized as important, with something that has an individualized expression. You see that in Manhattan now. They're hiring rock-star architects to do one-off residential buildings — Herzog & de Meuron on Bond Street, Jean Nouvel in Soho. Are we prepared to go as a far as "Marilyn?" It's been a big debate in my mind. The city needs all types of things."
John Bentley Mays interviewed Peter Clewes in this morning's G & M...
A resounding vote against contextualism
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
April 18, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
You can't go far in downtown Toronto without running into a tall building by architect Peter Clewes. He is a disciplined mid-career modernist, not (so far) a member of the tribe of avant-garde designers now dotting important North American cities with highly expressive, individualistic towers.
But over the past few years, Mr. Clewes (often in collaboration with his architectsAlliance colleague, the late Adrian DiCastri) has brought inner Hogtown home buyers much more affordable sophistication and intelligent art than we had before his time.
The old Gooderham and Worts distillery site, east of Parliament Street, is the focus of some of Mr. Clewes's most inventive new projects. This cluster of 45 brick buildings is one of North America's best-preserved groups of 19th-century industrial architecture. To transform this isolated place into a neighbourhood, and make it something better than a theme park, the developers who now own it decided, a few years back, to drop condo stacks into the Victorian layout — which is where Mr. Clewes came into the picture.
"The challenge of the site was the insertion of a sufficient amount of density, to revitalize a national historic site," this intense and talented architect told me in a conversation at the old distillery. "Density was needed to provide the financial horsepower to do that. How do you put in between a million and 1.5 million square feet of density in a way that has regard for the way this site is reinventing itself?"
The three towers, and especially the new corridors and intervals they define on the ground, are the architect's answers to this key question.
"They are wraparound buildings that are sculpted," Mr. Clewes said. "There's no deeper idea than that. They are simple, neutral buildings. But for us, what's important is always the spaces between the buildings, instead of the buildings themselves. There is a kind of hierarchy and progression in the spaces around the buildings.
"Trinity Street [which bisects the pedestrian district] is the principal axis. Then there are a series of thin lanes woven through the site, then a series of courts — residual sites between the buildings that can be inhabited. The bases [of the towers] are very open and transparent to allow 'publicness' to happen in a modern way. There isn't an idea of closed buildings. I think it's pretty cool, and it's coming along nicely."
Some years ago, when the Distillery District was under different management, three condominium blocks of a more conventional variety went up in the vicinity. The designers laboured hard to make the facades of these projects fit in among the weathered, attractively worn brick Victorian structures. So why not go along with critics who argue for more of such contextualism, a closer visual match of new buildings to old ones?
"Because they're wrong," Mr. Clewes said. "We need to create buildings of our time. Architecture is a record of where a city and a culture was at a particular time. This precinct is an industrial artifact, a social presence within the culture of Canada. It's important that we not blur the distinctiveness of this precinct, but rather amplify it. The exceptions in the urban framework articulate the city. The [earlier three towers, built before architectsAlliance's involvement] speak of a time in Toronto when people said, 'Let's be apologetic, let's say we're not inserting additional density in this precinct.' This isn't what we should do now."
Of the Distillery District buildings Mr. Clewes has worked on, the last two, especially, have been shortened by command of city officials. The architect has little patience for what he calls Toronto's "visceral reaction against height. It's a neurosis. But this is a very political world, and we have to have regard for that process, then come up with the best architectural solution we can."
At the present time, the most advanced tide of tall-building design is running against the squared-off glass and steel solutions Mr. Clewes and other classic modernists are providing. Many wealthy condo-buyers want glamorous, dramatic signature towers with more striking profiles, and this taste for the ultra is rapidly filtering down to less well-to-do purchasers.
Among his favourite local examples of what he doesn't do is Chinese designer Yansong Ma's sensuously feminine Absolute development in Mississauga, nicknamed "Marilyn." Mr. Clewes recognizes the challenge of such new buildings for architects of his stripe.
"There's the rise of the middle class and the importance of the individual. If you go to the "Marilyn" towers, you see they come from the desire of the middle class to be recognized as important, with something that has an individualized expression. You see that in Manhattan now. They're hiring rock-star architects to do one-off residential buildings — Herzog & de Meuron on Bond Street, Jean Nouvel in Soho. Are we prepared to go as a far as "Marilyn?" It's been a big debate in my mind. The city needs all types of things."
