Which of the four entries in the Etobicoke Civic Centre design competition do you favour?

  • Team 1: Moriyama + Teshima, MJMA, FORREC

    Votes: 17 15.9%
  • Team 2: Diamond Schmitt Architects, Michael Van Valkenberg Associates

    Votes: 26 24.3%
  • Team 3: KPMB Architects, West 8

    Votes: 42 39.3%
  • Team 4: Henning Larsen, Adamson Associates, PMA Landscape Architects

    Votes: 22 20.6%

  • Total voters
    107
  • Poll closed .
My first thought when I saw the "hero" renderings was Henning Larsen—it certainly stands out from the rest with its interpretation of the village typology in front of a row of towers. That certainly seems to be the Etobicoke of today, especially if you experience it in the Humber Bay Shores area, or even the Six Points/Islington area where this development is going to go up. I was also seduced by having a Danish firm in the mix, and these guys have certainly displayed a particular creativity in many of their completed works. The interior renderings certainly show off an attractive complex.

Where Henning Larsen totally lost me, however, was the public square. It has no focus, and feel, no intimacy, and it fails to give Dundas Street an urban edge at any point on the block. I think it deep-sixes the whole design.

The other three designs have better public squares, the lest appealing to me of which is Moriyama + Teshima's. Interesting that they want to swap the park block (as discussed above from across Dundas with an extension of the site to the east, but I'm not convinced by the renderings of how much that adds to their design overall). The real problem here though is that awful tower. It looks more forbidding to me than inviting, and seems to turn its back on everything other than the square, meaning that from most angles it will look unfriendly. For something as tall as it is, it should draw you to it, not turn you off.

KPMB has a solid if dated plan. It reminds me of the Valhalla Inn that was torn down several years ago now for condos along the 427, that same aesthetic, melded with every other building KPMB has ever designed. The details look beautifully handled, but they don't add up to a compelling whole for me. It's handsome and dignified, but it's dull dull dull. The public plaza, dominated by jack pines appeals to me on principle (I love those trees), but as rendered, I just don't believe that they can achieve what they're promising for at least 20 years after its planted and carefully tended. Those trees are finicky—you don't see many of them in the city—and I can't see them all thriving as vigorously here as promised by the renderings. It's also a monoculture planting, and as we are learning with ash trees right now, and as a couple of generations back learned with elms, you don't plant all one species because they can be wiped out in one go.

For me, Diamond Schmitt/MVVA stands out head and tails above the others. The tower has a both a monumentality with its slight (but restrained enough to avoid cheesiness) PoMo influence from the friezes at various levels, while benefitting from the playful injection of the staggered sky atriums. The wandering path of the staircase that runs through those atriums is pretty much begging me to climb it. At ground level, cantilevering porticos at Kipling and Bloor, and Kipling and Dundas sweep upwards encouraging passersby to wander in, the public square is nicely sheltered and surrounded by multiple levels of activity creating an amphitheatre feel, while the Dundas stairs at the south end specifically can be used for as theatre seating. If you haven't seen the retractable stage at the stairs' base with the hillock roof on it, check that out: that's a great little feature which would quickly become a landmark.

Inside, none of the council chamber plans beat the Diamond Schmitt one. It's beautiful, and it integrates wonderfully with the tiered seating of the Great Hall immediately outside its glass walls. The whole space in really inviting, with the community recreation centre on one side and the library on the other. South of the recreation centre you get a couple of shops and a restaurant, and voila, you've got a complete set of uses needed to keep the whole complex vital. It's really well thought out!

So, there you go. Diamond Schmitt MVVA for me.

42
 
Not an architect or urban designer, my background is more environmental systems and economics, but here's some quick thoughts:
  1. Really digging the Henning Larsen proposal's building make-up. The public square is nice, but could be improved upon; it has to be properly laid out for public events and gatherings, and the building has to be architecture has to be bold and symbolic; this is why NPS is great. In this case, the towers kind of impose too much and make it a rectangle, thinning/stretching a would-be crowd and pushing them back to the street, instead of letting them form a critical mass in the centre and permitting others to view the crowd from multiple elevated angles. So again, some tweaking. Hopefully tweaking keeps the lot of trees in the corner.
  2. Is KPMG f-ing serious with that ETOBICOKE sign? I personally spit on the thought, unless there's a serious proposal to de-amalgamate on the table (a sincere dream of mine).
  3. KPMB and Diamond Schmitt gain my immediate disapproval because they propose so much elevated public realm. I'm not a fan, because I think the majority of public space needs to be kept ground level and flow into the street. This allows visitors to know it's there, it promotes open air environments vs. a dark shadowy underbelly, it maximizes opportunity for on-site stormwater control and reduces the potential challenges and costly risks with maintenance of elevated and engineered vegetation. Just reminds me of Jackson Square, and I immediately turned my nose up at it.
  4. Moriyama/Teshima is better, it looks like still too much elevated public space, but hard to tell from the renderings, I'm having a hard time judging from the angles they provided. I do like the tower, and the amount of trees. If they could eliminate the building south of the tower and make that a heavily vegetated natural area, and rework the east portion as a public open gathering square, that would be ideal IMO.
So all that said, I'm left wanting with Henning Larsen and Moriyama/Teshima, but would pick the latter if I was forced to make a choice due to my higher value being placed on natural features. Not even entertaining the thought of the other two.
 
Agree broadly with i42's critique - the HLA proposal totally lost me on the landscape design - it produces an very harsh space that is going to be that much worst in winter.

The MTA tower struck me as unnecessarily monumental and self-conscious, in a Minitruth sort of way.

AoD
 
The Henning Larsen design reminds me of NPS in a bad way, with great architecture first and foremost and a mediocre public space in front of it. No more, please.
 
Not an architect or urban designer, my background is more environmental systems and economics, but here's some quick thoughts:
  1. Really digging the Henning Larsen proposal's building make-up. The public square is nice, but could be improved upon; it has to be properly laid out for public events and gatherings, and the building has to be architecture has to be bold and symbolic; this is why NPS is great. In this case, the towers kind of impose too much and make it a rectangle, thinning/stretching a would-be crowd and pushing them back to the street, instead of letting them form a critical mass in the centre and permitting others to view the crowd from multiple elevated angles. So again, some tweaking. Hopefully tweaking keeps the lot of trees in the corner.
  2. Is KPMG f-ing serious with that ETOBICOKE sign? I personally spit on the thought, unless there's a serious proposal to de-amalgamate on the table (a sincere dream of mine).
  3. KPMB and Diamond Schmitt gain my immediate disapproval because they propose so much elevated public realm. I'm not a fan, because I think the majority of public space needs to be kept ground level and flow into the street. This allows visitors to know it's there, it promotes open air environments vs. a dark shadowy underbelly, it maximizes opportunity for on-site stormwater control and reduces the potential challenges and costly risks with maintenance of elevated and engineered vegetation. Just reminds me of Jackson Square, and I immediately turned my nose up at it.
  4. Moriyama/Teshima is better, it looks like still too much elevated public space, but hard to tell from the renderings, I'm having a hard time judging from the angles they provided. I do like the tower, and the amount of trees. If they could eliminate the building south of the tower and make that a heavily vegetated natural area, and rework the east portion as a public open gathering square, that would be ideal IMO.
So all that said, I'm left wanting with Henning Larsen and Moriyama/Teshima, but would pick the latter if I was forced to make a choice due to my higher value being placed on natural features. Not even entertaining the thought of the other two.
While KPMB's has a podium with the dark underbelly you mentioned, the Diamond Schmitt scheme has its roof terrace built over the rec centre pool and gym and adjacent to the fitness centre and running track. It's accessible by stair/ramp/amphitheatre combinations at the northwest and southeast corners that work with the natural fall of 4m diagonally across the site. The roof terrace is a sculpture park (part of the design brief) so there's something to draw people up there, with views down to the clear focus of the central green space at ground level. The expanses of green roof are just roofs, so it's not nearly as much elevated public space as it might appear.
 
Good god. That mjma/mta proposal looks like it was designed by a bunch of mediocre undergrad design students with minimal supervision and the sole mandate that "angles and parks are good". It's an incoherent mess.

The henning Larsen scheme is interesting. My one concern is that their public space looks as though it is merely leftover from their building massing. At the presentation, they made an argument showing wind studies about how their building massing would create a warmer microclimate around the building in winter. To me, this seems like a whole lot of post rationalization. It seems that the other schemes which protect the public plaza on three sides would do a much better job of sheltering from the wind. anyhow, all the designs shelter from north-westerly cold winds, just without the fancy grass-hopper diagrams. But still an interesting scheme with lovely facade design.

Diamond and Schmitt. Yeah, it's okay. In their presentation it seemed as though they were covering for a lot of bad design through the use of technology... and they kept pointing it out as if it was a plus! For instance, they couldn't fit a stage in their public plaza, so one of the burms lifts up on hydraulic arms to reveal a stage underneath... literally looks like it's wearing a tupee, absolutely ridiculous. I think their renderings are misleading, is that whole podium really going to be mullion-less glass? And if you think they're really going to get away with an all glass council chamber (can you say security in a post 9-11 world), or that diamond and Schmitt really has the ability to detail this project elegantly, you're delusional. Like most of their work, it's just kind of clumsy, and would end up even more so once built.

KPMB... while this scheme isn't an exercise in fancy form-making, its strengths lie in the design of smaller moments and prioritization of a human scale. I like west 8's jack-pine forest- it's unconventional and whimsical- and the clear reference to etobicoke's modernist history- the form reminds me of SOM's lever house. Also feel like this is the most resolved scheme, with the most attention paid to individual spaces and experiences, perhaps at the expense of being iconic. oh well, iconic things never did much for me anyways, they tend to be very one dimensional.
Check out Diamond Schmitt's Southbrook winery, where the cap-less curtain wall reflects the vineyards much like what is shown in this scheme. KPMB's scheme is very well resolved but feels too rational and rigid to me, and looks like a generic "civic centre" that could be anywhere (like Vaughan, without the clock tower).
 
Okay, everything's done! All four entry overviews can be found on our front page, most easily accessed from our wrap-up article. As mentioned earlier, all of the renderings (more than you'll find in the articles), can be found in the dataBase file linked atop the page.

Now it's your turn to weigh-in by voting in the poll near the top of the page, and leave us remarks telling us why you like or don't like each entry! I'll weigh in on that shortly, myself.

42
Thank you - great job distilling the four projects.
 
k123 asked about my comment that the KPMB design was a "generic civic centre" what makes the DS one any so. That’s a good question, especially because these two out of the four teams share the same basic parti and both are curtainwall towers on a podium. Neither has a look that says you’re in central Etobicoke (whatever that look might be). But the site still has specifics in the street grid, topography, and adjoining context.
  1. KPMB’s plan is beautifully elegant and rational, but only the diagonal line on the southwest side of the rec centre acknowledges the fact Bloor and Kipling are not orthogonal. The DS plan has the podium aligned with both Bloor and Kipling, and recognizing that Kipling is closer to running true north-south, rotates the tower to get the best solar orientation for the PV arrays on the roof and the south facade. The northwest corner of the DS podium is clearly the main entrance with a large canopy and a view right through the interior to the civic green; the southwest corner similarly has a major entrance to draw in people coming up from the Kipling TTC and GO stations; and the southeast corner opens up to connect to the future park diagonally across Dundas. The KPMB entrances are less well defined and the east wing closes the civic square to the park.

  2. KPMB’s tower is a classic centre core with two slipped masses to slim down the profile, again beautifully elegant and rational. But the curtainwall elevations are almost identical on all sides. DS’s tower uses a side core to the north, which (assuming open plan offices) orients the floor plate to the best views (east to downtown, south to the lake, and west to Mississauga) and minimizes overlook of the residential neighbourhood to the north. And while the south facade is all glass, to keep down the overall percentage of glazing the north, east and west sides have many fewer windows and solid panels in shades of blue to give some variety to the elevations.

  3. Both designs have public space on the roof of the podium. The DS design uses the slope of the site (falling almost 4m from Bloor to Dundas) to help make it easier to get up to the terrace level which is programmed for a sculpture garden and winter skating rink. From Bloor you go up the stair/ramp only one storey to get on top of the two-storey rec centre, and from Dundas, there’s an intermediate terrace that’s also only one storey above grade. So people can shortcut diagonally across the site over the terrace and use it even when the civic centre is closed. The KPMB podium floats disconnected above the civic square, you can only get there by stairs and elevators from inside so it’s really more an amenity for people working in the tower.
You can argue whether any of these things matter, or if the resolution is convincing, but the DS design uses the particularities of the site to help inform the architecture. Doesn't mean it's better for this reason alone, just that it's a different approach.
 
MTA - It's nice, the extended park idea is smart and I wish they go for it. Block after block of tower+podium needs that breathe of green space, not just in Etobicoke but everywhere.
DS - Do people really like this? To me, it just looks like they covered up their boring design with laughable gimmicks such as the retractable theatre or that glass that turns transparent to opaque in the council chamber.
KPMB - Rather boring, the design is pretty much the same massing that was given to them. But there are some cool features that might work *coughdiamondschmittcough* The phasing of the library is really interesting. Not sold on the jack pine trees though.
HLA - Stunning renders, but the fact is, it's just a cluster of corporate buildings. Also not convinced on the plaza however.
 
I've read a number of comments about this or that design being boring or conservative. But this was not a blue-sky beauty contest, the competition brief had a budget limit (and each team had to submit a costing report to back up their design) and one key condition on form: the building should approach net zero as much as possible. This means reducing the energy use to the absolute minimum and then offsetting it with renewable energy sources. For our climate the main energy use is in heating, so the building should not only have a well-insulated envelope, it should also have the minimal amount of envelope to begin with for a given volume. A sphere would be the ideal, but in general a lower, more compact form would have less surface area than one that is tall and thin, or one with lots of setbacks and corners (take four 1x1 cubes and count the wall and roof areas when you arrange them in a square or in a "T" or stack them 4 high). I think KPMB and DS took this more seriously. You can still criticize them for not doing more with the massing they started with, but true creativity needs constraints so I find it interesting to understand the background around the design process.
 
Interesting that in the last hour, the KPMB design—which had been dead last in the voting (votes were 8•15•5•8 respectively)—has jumped into first place. During the hour, the votes for KPMB have surged and Henning Larsen has picked up two so that the tally is now 8•15•21•10.

It's pretty obvious that some order went out to pump up the KPMB numbers.

42
 
I do really like MJMA's concept of relocating parkland towards a more central location rather than fronting onto railway.

Hopefully the winner takes this concept into later phases.
 
Interesting that in the last hour, the KPMB design—which had been dead last in the voting (votes were 8•15•5•8 respectively)—has jumped into first place. During the hour, the votes for KPMB have surged and Henning Larsen has picked up two so that the tally is now 8•15•21•10.

It's pretty obvious that some order went out to pump up the KPMB numbers.

42

Are we having a bentway moment again?

AoD
 

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