CAN JAMES CORNER BUILD A BEAUTIFUL WATERFRONT?
Another year, another set of great expectations. Can we solve the waterfront (finally)? Can we make the urban vote count in the provincial elections? Can we embrace arts mega-festival with outsize ambitions? Here are five movers and shakers who will leave a footprint - hopefully a good one - on the city in 2007
ALEX BOZIKOVIC
Concrete mixing and cross-country skiing: It's a strange recipe for an urban neighbourhood, but that's what the near future of the eastern waterfront is going to look like. And if James Corner has his way, it just might evolve Toronto into a city that lives on the water rather than ignoring it.
The New York-based landscape architect is overseeing the creation of the ambitious 965-acre Lake Ontario Park. Breaking ground this year, it will tie 37 kilometres of shoreline land, from Cherry Beach to Ashbridges Bay (including the Leslie Street Spit), into a new public area with room for all sorts of recreational and conservational uses.
The site "is all edge," Mr. Corner says. "It's remarkably diverse. And it's got a kind of wildness, which is rare so close to a metropolitan centre. So the art in the design is to make something of all this edge, all this diversity."
Mr. Corner's firm, Field Operations, is known for reworking post-industrial, unpicturesque landscapes. Most prominently, he has been gradually remaking the massive Fresh Kills landfill on New York's Staten Island into a verdant park with wind turbines and, eventually, museums.
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"One of the great strengths of [Mr. Corner's] work is that if a site has an industrial history, continuing industrial uses and other development pressures, he doesn't see those as contradictory," says Professor Charles Waldheim, director of the landscape architecture program at the University of Toronto. "Field Operations sees those as a menu within which the project can occur."
Indeed, Mr. Corner is focused on maintaining a balance between environmental preservation, recreation and urban character for Lake Ontario Park. "The idea is to create something spectacular that capitalizes on the attributes the site already has: its bigness, its exposure to the weather, this sort of wild thematic," Mr. Corner explains.
He promises to integrate spaces for recreation -- swimming, boating, running, cycling, cross-country skiing, soccer -- with nature space and even restaurants, tied together by a carefully plotted series of pathways.
It's an ambitious vision, and the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation hopes that the park will become a centre for the city, like Vancouver's Stanley Park. Mr. Corner believes the impact will be tremendous. "Today, it's not only hard to get to the waterfront, but your experience of it is really fragmented. And this will create a kilometres-long continuous waterfront. It's a total transformation of the image of the city as now a lakefront Canadian city."
