A building that harkens back to both Toronto’s distant past, and its 1960s heyday, has reached its third floor in one of the city’s most historic neighbourhoods.
The Brant Park condos are built on a series of parcels of land wrangled together by salesman and developer Brad Lamb, who specializes in putting such packages together.
Designed by Rob Cadeau of
Architects Alliance, with Peter Clewes as the principle in charge, the 11-storey building with planned ground-level retail replaces several townhouses and an old commercial building.
“Basically, the design is first of all in keeping with the scale and continuity with the mid-rise scale of neighbourhing warehouse buildings,” Cadeau says. “In terms of its scale, it’s following suit with that.
He adds: “The imagery of the building is establishing a very simple, elegant, well proportioned white grid which sets it off from the neighbourhood and creates a bit of a significant architecture, but at the same time, it possesses a kind of quiet elegance in the proportioning.”
Cadeau says his design is intended to recall the sort of iron frame buildings you see on Front Street, across from the Flatiron.
“In an abstract way, it’s reinterpreting the frame, the motif of masonry frame warehouse buildings that you see throughout the city,” he says, “but in a kind of modern way. But it’s really portraying that same elegant idea as buildings that really make the fabric of the old city of Toronto, paying homage to that in a modern way.”
Cadeau says the design also serves to create what he calls a “continuity of street wall,” replacing the buildings of various heights that occupied the sites before, which he says had a “chaotic effect on the street.”
According to the developer, the building should be ready by October.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Rob Cadeau; Debbie Macdonald