Forgery League: The Big Here

Wednesday 18 April 2007

Bringing back the Don

Monday night I caught the presentations by the four design teams chosen as finalists in the TWRC competition to create a plan for the Lower Don Lands - the area west of the Don Roadway, between the railway yard north of the Gardiner and the shipping channel. All four presentations had some great elements, and some were downright inspiring. (It was a stark contrast to the city’s street-furniture tender, a shabby excercise that seems to get worse the more we hear about it.)

The mouth of the Don River was once the largest wetland on the Great Lakes, according to one of last night’s presentations. 19th-century development and industry reduced it to a cesspit, and engineers finally confined it to a narrow concrete-lined ditch to prevent floods and channel sewage straight into the lake. Goal one of the competition, therefore, was to renaturalize the river mouth - a task that most of them handled well.

Here’s a rundown of the four proposals:

Of the four, I was least impressed with the one from Atelier Girot (Switzerland). Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, designers of the tiny but delightfully layered Cloud Gardens Park and Conservatory at Bay and Adelaide, were somehow involved, but it’s hard to tell exactly who did what in these proposals. Starting from a rather vague visual motif of intersecting L-shapes, they interlace parallel “fingers” of land and water to produce “a new water based city”. I’m skeptical, though, of the way the arrangement draws out the “urban” parts of the district into long, narrow strips. It’s a little too Le Corbusier - just with water instead of grass, pretty on paper with little regard for walkability. The urban fabric is too loose and disjointed to be healthy.

Stoss Landscape Urbanism (USA; along with Toronto’s Brown + Storey, designers of Dundas Square, among other firms) do a bit better, and I like their approach to the wetlands portion of the site. The Essroc silos along Cherry St become a little island unto themselves, connected to the “mainland” on either side by a spidery bridge. But despite their invocation of “classic” Toronto neighbourhoods like Little Italy and St Lawrence, the arrangement of the buildings seems a little haphazard. Their presentation talked quite a bit about public spaces, but I’m not convinced the spaces they describe will come to life. (Hypothesis: public areas on the edges of the urban fabric will be used less than those in the midst of neighbourhoods. I’m going to have to keep an eye on some already existing spaces to see if it’s borne out in practice.)

Back to St Lawrence - one of the great legacies of 1970s urbanism in Toronto, the classic example of a vibrant neighbourhood built practically from scratch. It succeeds in large part because it’s within walking distance of downtown, and extends the urban fabric seamlessly. There is no sharp dividing line, and hopefully development around the reborn Distillery District to the east will weave itself in just as neatly.

Contrast this with the area along Queen’s Quay, which has seen plenty of development but hasn’t quite come to life yet. One problem is that the streetscape is full of gaps, and is too coarse-grained - it’s just not comfortable. Furthermore, it’s squeezed into a narrow sliver between the lake and the Gardiner, disconnected from the rest of the city. And it’s not on the way between anywhere and anywhere else. Likewise, a neighbourhood in the Lower Don Lands will be cut off by the river, and I suspect it’ll always feel a little removed from the rest of town, no matter what. So we’d better make the neighbourhood as strong as possible, and that won’t be helped by spreading the buildings apart. Better to keep the “urban” parts dense and clumped together, so that it’s all walkable.

The team led by Weiss/Manfredi (USA; and including Toronto’s du Toit Alsopp Hillier, architects of the Evergreen project, further up the river at the old Brick Works) goes the furthest in this regard, clustering all the buildings into a tidy grid. Their scheme - perhaps unrealistically - changes the alignment of the Gardiner without actually getting rid of it, so that it curves above a renaturalized wetland laced with boardwalks for walking and biking. Some might find it a bit of a stretch, but the juxtaposition of the natural world with the monumental concrete beast overhead has a certain poetry to it. (It’s worth noting that all the proposals assume the Gardiner will stay, at least for now.) On the opposite shore, a peninsula sweeps out and up to a lookout point jutting out over the harbour.

One puzzling aspect of this scheme is the way that roads in and out of the site meander. Inspired, they claim, by the art of Norval Morriseau, the team have filled their plan with sweeping lines, and this entails disconnecting Cherry St and having it zoom off to the east, while Parliament curves in from the west to join the “lower” section of Cherry St. Thankfully, the proposed bike and pedestrian system seems to make up for this, with trails branching off from the main routes to reach most parts of the site fairly easily. I’m not so sure about the huge, arching bridge, though - looks like it could get windy up there.

The scheme from Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (USA) and company offers an interesting alternative: keep the despised Keating Channel and turn it into a canal promenade, bringing a bit of Venice or Paris to the waterfront, as so many planners dream of. With Lake Shore Boulevard shifted to the north, the Gardiner would become a “monumentally scaled urban colonnade” above the north side of the promenade. This gives the built areas on opposite sides of the canal a stronger connection to one another, and helps them feel like part of a larger whole. Furthermore, the neighbourhood on the north shore would be better connected to the rest of the city by opening up more routes under the railway lands. The only problem: the renaturalized river mouth then ends up running through the center of the site, severing the urbanized area into clumps once again.

Maybe I’m being too cynical here. Perhaps if the place is designed right, people will find these little pocket-neighbourhoods cozy and pleasantly sheltered from the bustle of the city. But at the very least they’ll have to be better planned than the developments along Queen’s Quay, or the condos west of the Humber River. All the proposals wisely allow mixed-use - that is, business, residential and institutional uses are all mingled together, often within the same building - and promise housing in a range of sizes and prices to allow a healthy diversity in the neighbourhood’s population. Hopefully there will be a good mix of spaces built to allow for diversity of businesses as well.

We shall see. The announcement of the winner is expected early next month. The displays from the four teams (including pretty models) will remain up until next Monday at BCE Place, where you can also comment on the proposals. You can also see selected visuals from all of them at the official site. It’s also well worth checking out the competition brief which lays out the requirements and constraints for the designs. Note that the proposals all extended the scope of the redesign to include the entire ‘peninsula’ north of the shipping channel, and that most of the land under consideration is currently in the hands of several private owners. Whichever design is selected, realizing it will involve a lot of tricky negotiating.

It’s not often I venture into the port lands, myself - who ever does, unless they work in film or TV? But by coincidence, the next morning I found myself riding the 72A bus through the heart of the neighbourhood-to-be (to pick up a digital recorder from Trew Audio on Villiers St; more about this soon). On a whim I walked from there to work, from Cherry St to the Don Roadway and up under the Gardiner. It was exciting to picture it lined with dense housing, backed up against a restored wetland. I think I’ll miss the railway spurs though - it’s always kind of cool to see train tracks curve almost casually through an intersection…

Our new office looks out on the river from the east side of the Don Valley Parkway, and since we moved there in January I’ve felt more connected than ever to the neighbourhood and its natural environment. As it gets warmer I’m planning to check out some events presented by the Task Force to Bring Back the Don, a city-sponsored citizen’s group. For Don-related news, John Routh’s blog is a good source.

In closing, some words from the Task Force’s web site: “It took a century to get the Don River to a degraded state… We are ready to spend another century, if necessary, to bring it back.”