City Building : Development News

The popular play castle in High Park that fell to arson on March 17 will soon be rebuilt, thanks in part to Michael Holmes.

"Toronto is his home town," says Rob Richardson of the city's parks department. "He's certainly done projects all over the place. He saw this as a community tragedy, as we all did. It seemed like a really good fit for him."

Holmes has signed up landscape architect Janet Rosenberg, who will also be donating her services in kind.

"We hope to be able to look at the design possibly by the end of the week," Richardson says.

In addition to Holmes and Rosenberg, the Sprott Foundation has offered to match community donations to the project up to $30,000.

With all the help, the plan is to have the work substantially completed by Saturday, July 7, when community members and other interested people are invited to show up at the Jamie Bell playground to help put finishing touches on the place, including staining and moving mulch.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rob Richardson

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The city has decided to ask its citizens what sort of cultural spaces they need.

The massive series of public consultations, which began this month with councillor Michael Thompson's ward, will continue throughout the year and into 2013. They're meant to elicit opinions and data about what people need and where.

The consultations relate to any space that could be used for any cultural activity, including parks, community centres or church basements.

The emphasis will be on space for young people, but as Thompson says, most if not all the spaces under discussion will be multi-use. "Space is space," he says. "If you have a facility that has multifunctional space, it can be used by anyone."

Though the consultations are not off to a great start—the councillor's own consultation attracted an audience of three—Thompson, who's heading the initiative as chair of the city's Economic Development Committee, is hopeful that it will pick up steam as it rolls through the first 20 scheduled wards.

The consultations could result in new structures being built, old ones being re-purposed or public-private deals being struck for city-sponsored use of available private space.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Michael Thompson

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Diamond and Schmitt Architects (DSAI) and multidisciplinary design firm DIALOG will be planning St. Michael's Hospital's next big expansion and renovation.

In a system that the Ontario government describes as transferring "risks associated with the design, construction and financing of complex hospital projects," the two firms will come up with the planning, design and compliance documents that will lead to a request for proposals from consortia of builders and architects.

Matt Smith, the Diamond and Schmitt architect who led the design of St. Mike's new Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, is heading the project.

"It's basically an addition and renovations to St Michael's Hospital as part of an overall redevelopment process," he says. "Some old buildings they need to move people out of and update some of their space."

The project will ultimately include a 17-storey tower, the renovation of 150,000 square feet of the current hospital, and the expansion of the emergency department, which has become city's busiest, seeing more than 70,000 patients a year.

The plan will be complete in about 12 months. By taking on this role, DSAI have removed themselves from the eventual design competition that will result from this planning process.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Matt Smith


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Centennial Arena in Scarborough got a $50,000 boost last week when Lowe's presented the city with a cheque to fund its renovation.

Part of a nationwide marketing scheme and partnership with Hockey Canada, the North Carolina-based home improvement chain gives out two such cheques a year to hockey arenas across the country.

Lowe's has been operating in Canada since 2007.

"The key upgrade is the installation of what's known as a low-emissive ceiling, a 'low-e' ceiling," says Rob Richardson, manager of partnership development for the city's Parks and Forestry department. "It's a reflective ceiling that adds a number of benefits to the facility, most importantly its energy efficiency. Some of the side benefits are that it also increases the lighting levels. We're hoping it may have some additional benefits to the sound in the arena. Arenas are notorious for echoey sound."

Part of the Lowe's program is to encourage community involvement in the project, so on June 2 and 3, neighbourhood volunteers will clean up the arena and paint hallways and locker rooms.

Richardson says all the work will be done by the end of summer, and that there will be a re-opening celebration in September.

The mayor was represented at the handover ceremony last week by councillor Mike Del Grande, who told Yonge Street, "It's always great to have private interests collaborate to help the city in which they do business."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rob Richardson, Mike Del Grande


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There are plenty of bars in the Distillery District, but until now, it's been a hike to get a bottle of booze.

Last week, the LCBO solved the irony with its latest shop opened at 222 Front Street East, between Princess and Berkley. It's not exactly in the Distillery District, but it's the closest one so far.

The store, an adaptive re-use of part of the old Toronto Sun building that fronts on King, has 8,000 square feet of selling space, with a selection of 2,200 products.

The location was picked, according to Julie Rosenberg at LCBO communications, because market research has indicated the population in the area will increase by 27 per cent over the next 10 years.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Julie Rosenberg

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The final meeting in the process meant to accelerate the development of the Port Lands is taking place on May 24.

The process was begun when the Mayor Rob Ford's administration decided Toronto's waterfront development was going too slowly, and also in response to their counterplan to build a Ferris wheel.

"Up to this point, we've had two rounds of public consultation where we've engaged the public initially to talk about goals and initiatives," says Waterfront Toronto's Michelle Noble. "This meeting is to present the key findings about where we're at currently. We want public input and we're in the final stages of developing a joint report with the City of Toronto and the Toronto Region Conservation Authority."

After this meeting, a report will go to the city's executive committee in June, who will decide whether to forward it for full council and Ford consideration in July.

The May 24 public meeting will take place between 6:30pm and 9:30pm in the North Building of Metro Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front Street West) in room 105. There will also be a webcast, with participation open to all who log in.

For more information, you can visit the site.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Michelle Noble

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A house in North York has earned its builder and architect special recognition for being the embodiment of the five essentials of healthy housing.

The principles, set out by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), relate to occupant health, energy efficiency, resource efficiency, environmental responsibility and affordability.

"The architect takes full advantage of the passive house standard, building envelope and passive solar gain to create a house that could virtually operate without an active heating system," says Jamie Shipley, a senior research consultant with the CMHC in Toronto. "Then, on top of that is the occupants' detail that was required to make sure the house has healthy air: Everything that goes into that house is low VOC [Volatile Organic Compounds], no off-gassing."

The CMHC recognizes one builder a year who has built either a single family home or a multi-residential building to these standards. It's unusual for an architect to also be recognized, but the CMHC in this instance is acknowledging what it feels were substantial contributions from Sustainable.TO in its work with Greenbilt Homes.

The house, a single family dwelling known as the Willowdale Passive Solar House, is at 84 Norton Avenue, just south of Yonge and Finch.

Though the CMHC is a national organization, the healthy Housing Recognition program is only operated in Ontario.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jamie Shipley

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A new midrise is rising at Queen and Spadina.

The 12-storey condo by the Sorbara Group had its topping off ceremony last week. With occupancy slated for summer 2013, the building is starting to take shape.

The garage will include four shared bicycles and one vehicle for car-sharing.

Designed by Core Architects, the 87-unit building is extending the King Street, Freed ethos north. The white framed structure, vaguely reminiscent of 1960s public architecture, adds high-end design with mid-level prices ($240,000-$850,000) to the increasingly popular neighbourhood.

Writer: Bert Archer

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Though it was quietly launched in December, traffic is only now picking up for the anti-graffiti and pothole-reporting apps, after the city officially announced it two weeks ago.

"I have a dashboard here," says Neil Evans, director of Toronto 311 and the man in charge of the app initiative, as he looks at his stats on the number of reports received. "On the 22nd [of April], we probably had about 30."

SeeClickFix, one of the open API apps the city is promoting, lets people take pictures of graffiti or potholes, asks them to describe the problem, and then automatically tags the location the picture was taken in using its GIS.

Once the report is sent from a phone, Evans explains, “it comes into our system and depending on what type of service request it is, it either goes directly to the service fulfilling division, or it gets viewed by one of our CSRs. It's only property graffiti ones that get received by our CSRs."

Part of the system involves checking the reported graffiti against a database of city-commissioned or city-approved graffiti, to avoid, as much as possible, city workers "cleaning up" public art.

It's early days, with little data on how effective this system will prove. When I tried it this week, sitting in the Future Bakery on the southwest corner of Bloor and Brunswick, the GIS thought I was at 415 Spadina, just south of College.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Neil Evans

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Work is about to begin on Portland Slip, part of what will shortly become a system of promenades that will allow people to walk the entire waterfront.

"The promenade itself will look very similar to the Water's Edge Promenade at Sherbourne Common," says JD Reeves, a project manager with Waterfront Toronto. "This is one more piece in the master plan that will eventually have a continuous promenade from the airport area to the east through East Bayfront."

The bits of the system are being constructed in a fashion Reeves describes as opportunistic—Portland Slip is going ahead now because the city was redoing the dock wall beside the malting silos. So though Portland Slip doesn't hook up with Water's Edge yet, it does open up the promenade system to include Ireland Park, a previously orphaned space that Waterfront Toronto is now confident will get a lot more foot traffic.

Work should be finished by fall, with tree planting to commence next spring.

Writer: Bert Archer
Sources: JD Reeves, Simon Karam

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Acadia, Cocktail Bar and Barchef got some competition last week when Spirit House opened on Portland after two years of part-time renovation turned the space from a teaching centre into a five-night-a-week bar.

"I've been in the space for 10 years," says owner Len Fragomeni. "I also own and operate the Toronto Institute of Bartending as well as a hospitality company.

"Two years ago, I decided that we needed to evolve the business into a stomping ground for everything that we teach and preach."

The renovation—which was thorough judging from the highly finished look of the place—took place in the evenings, in a rotating series of sectioned-off spaces, while the space was used during the day for classes and tastings. The biggest addition, Fragomeni says, is the Portland Street entrance, which used to be a window for the building, whose main administrative entrance is around the corner on Adelaide.

The part-time reno, which employed mostly workers already working on other projects in the area, kept the renovation costs low. "The budget was $200,000," Fragomeni says, "and we actually came in under budget."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Len Fragomeni

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The committee tasked with figuring out what to do about the enormous backlog of repairs to Toronto's subsidized housing met for the first time last week, beginning a process that it hopes will resolve the $751-million problem.

Their deadline, tight for such committees, is to submit a final report by September 10.

"It's obviously a challenging task," says councillor Ana Bailão. "We're going to be ensuring that we have a concerned and open process, that we engage tenants, that we engage stakeholders, and I'm sure we're going to be able to bring something to the table in September."

The initial meeting, held April 16, was organizational in nature, setting interim goals and laying out how the committee will operate. Its first task will be to send out a questionnaire to all Toronto Community Housing tenants. One of the chief challenges there is to get the questionnaire translated into as many languages as that may require.

The committee is scheduled to release an interim report on May 28, likely before responses to the questionnaire are received.

In the meantime, community consultations are being organized to include tenants and other stakeholders.

According to city staff, almost every TCH property requires repair of some sort, whether major or simply fresh coats of paint. One of the committee's jobs is to perform a sort of triage, applying what funds are available to the most urgently needed repairs.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Ana Bailão

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The Sustainable Design Awards were handed out last week, with a three-way tie for the top prize.

"The jury's selections paralleled the variety of the submissions," says Mike Lovas, the awards' founder and current Ontario College of Design University student. "Each winning submission seemed to represent a different approach or sector of design practice: there was a mobile app, an urban plan, a piece of critical design and a designed space/furniture. All very different manifestations of sustainable design."

The winners were third-year environmental design student Hannah Smith for a green-space app that would allow community organizers to plan community gardens and improve parks; Ian Brako, a first-year environmental design student, and third-year graphic design student Laura Headley for their public-transit food system that would engage mass transit to transport locally grown food into the city; and Benjamin Gagneux from the spatial design program (on exchange from L'École de design Nantes Atlantique) for his design to create a library of sustainability resources out of recycled wooden shipping pallets.

Honourable mention went to Elliot Vredenburg for his jewellery-based carbon-credit micro-trading currency system.

The student choice award went to fourth-year industrial design student Matthew Del Degan. His entry, Obot (The Robot), was a design for a low-production-run children's toy made out of EcoPoxy, a soybean resin.

The awards were sponsored by OCAD U and presented by Sustainable TO Architecture and Building.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mike Lovas

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Last week marked the official re-opening of Osgoode Hall Law School after an extensive redesign by Diamond Schmitt Architects.

"Some cities are built at the right time, some cities are not built at the right time. Dublin was very lucky to be built at the height of Georgian elegance," says architect Jack Diamond. "Unfortunately, Osgoode Hall was not built at the height of architectural elegance."

In tackling the project on the York University campus, Diamond says, "there were several things we had as our objectives. Another flaw in the original building—it wasn't easy to find one's way around, because of the "blind" nature of the building, not only externally but internally; students never knew whether the faculty was in or out. The common room looked like a nasty sports locker room with no windows whatsoever."

The new design is a 215,000-square-foot reorganization of the 44-year-old school around an atrium, with a new 23,000-square-foot single-storey addition.

"The aim of the design was obviously to clarify the plan, to make it accessible and understandable," says Diamond, "to introduce great amounts of natural light and to improve the quality of space so that people would spend more time on campus. That whole lack of a sense of community is exacerbated now by computer, where people can work at home, have access to legal documents, without having to go to the library."

York raised $32 million for the project, which was bumped up by another $25 million through the federal and provincial governments' Knowledge Infrastructure Program.

"The net effect has been quite stunning," Diamond says of the new facility, named the Ignat Kaneff building after the lead donor, a Toronto area developer of Bulgarian extraction. "One of the problem is it's suffering from its success. It's so popular with non-law students that you have to show your law student card to get in."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Jack Diamond

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The short list has been settled and the winners of the first Sustainable Design Awards open to all OCAD students will be announced tomorrow.

The awards are the brainchild of Mike Lovas, 31, a mature student with an engineering background who entered the industrial design program at OCAD last year and almost immediately realized very little was being said in his classes about sustainable design.

Lovas says, in fact, that he was "shocked at how little sustainable issues were being brought up, considering industrial design is all about mass production, pumping out lots of stuff. There wasn't a whole lot of talk at that point about the implications and impact of mass production would be on society, the environment, and people."

One of the reasons, he realized after he started talking to friends and professors about his idea for a prize, was that sustainability in this context is hard to define. The college was quick to get on board with the prize, which was offered last year but only to industrial design students.

In order to take the difficulty of definition into account, the guidelines are purposely vague, written in the form of a series of questions about material and systems. "Design" itself is open to interpretation, and the five-member jury, headed by New York editor and School of Visual Arts teacher Alan Chochinov, was open to pretty much anything.

The shortlist includes a design for a dish rack that diverts its run-off to water herbs, a plan for an "ecoburb" and another to turn the city's lane ways into green spaces.

There will be prizes for first, second and third, as well as a student choice award, with first prize being $1,000. There were 51 entries.

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Mike Lovas

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