Brian Curtner is a partner with current "It" architectural firm Quadrangle, responsible for everything from the Candy Factory to the Toy Factory lofts. Curtner and his firm specialize in a particular form of urban architecture known as adaptive reuse, which has been responsible, over the past decade, for a remarkable shift in Toronto's urban fabric.

Adaptive reuse is everywhere you look downtown (as it is in Vancouver's Yaletown -- and parts of Montreal). The 51 Division police headquarters at Front and Parliament (by ERA Architects Inc) is the old Consumers Gas purifying plant, dating from 1899. The Distillery District is one big adaptive reuse. And the so-called Kings regenerative plan, initiated in 1996, has ensured that King Street between Parliament and Spadina has developed enormously in the last 15 years, but almost always through the re-use of the area's former industrial buildings, saving the strip from random sprinklings of individual projects, and maintaining a streetscape that had been familiar for a century.

Though some may see it as an inherently conservative and pessimistic approach to city-building -- one of its underlying assumptions being that what's there already is better than anything new that might be built -- it could just as easily be seen as a sort of braking system on boom-time development. There's no danger the entire city will be adaptively reused (though we're seeing the first Modernist reuses now), but the maintenance of certain pockets in this refreshing way ensures the city will never again lose touch with its own built past, the way it did with its 18th-century Georgian incarnation.

Yonge Street spoke to Curtner about the work he and his firm have done around the city, and about the role adaptive re-use can play in the continual process of urban construction and design.


Bert Archer: What is adaptive reuse?

Brian Curtner: It's taking a building and adapting it to another use, and in the process creating a new and unique environment. It involves taking an older building, not necessarily heritage, and recognizing the potential of putting a new function, a new use in it.

What are some examples of adaptive reuse in Toronto?

Two residential examples that we worked on are the Toy Factory and the Candy Factory, which were both complicated, but for different reasons. My partner has just finished the Olympic Building, which is now the Rogers CityTV headquarters at Dundas Square.

The Toy Factory [in Liberty Village] was fascinating because it has so many aspects to it. We took down part of the building, we added to it substantially, there are pieces we kept inside, it was very complicated.

What role can and should adaptive reuse play in the development of a city?

There's the green story. Reusing something instead of demolishing. You're not knocking down a bunch of concrete, brick, and mortar, filling up a landfill site with construction material, but selectively, surgically, changing the building, keeping as much as you can, replacing things with modern building techniques.
There's also the heritage component to it. If there is a strong heritage, you can keep the parts of the building that are of real heritage value while giving the building new life, new use.

But for me, it's mostly about the urban fabric. The building has occupied that space for a long time and it has a certain scale and proportion and a certain presence within the urban fabric. Do you really have to take it down, or can you use it in a different way? Build on top, build underneath, take adjoining buildings and add to it, and still have that presence, that comfort it brings to the urban fabric, while bringing a new and energetic use.

What makes a good candidate for adaptive re-use? What would make for a bad one?

The magic is in figuring out what's really good about a particular old building, and then coming up with a use that makes sense for it, and capitalizing on it in a unique way. There is a logic, like the Factory Loft projects, where you have an old multi-storey building, which has good bones, where the structure, whether it be the wood posts and beams, or wood floors and bricks walls, allow it to become almost anything. Those are no-brainers.

The most interesting ones are where you take a building which is kind of tired for some reason, like the old 1970s Lever Brothers office building overlooking the Don Valley Parkway, and look for strengths it may have in totally different areas. In this case, we turned an inefficient office building into a completely new kind of car dealership.

As an office building, it really didn't work so well. The floor plates were too small, and that means that when you put in things like updated air conditioning and elevators, it wasn't very efficient, so when it got too old, no one would have been interested in renovating it as an office building.

As a car dealership, it's got some fantastic possibilities. In my opinion it's really striking, because of the creative use of the cars on the upper levels. It's got an important position on a fast-moving highway; it's a big, strong, simple statement that also is pretty intoxicating. It's a great billboard and a great icon for BMW to display their brand.

Do you have a favourite among your adaptive re-use projects?

I'm partial to the Bloor Street project because it's the most current and most complicated as far as I'm concerned. Adding the new stuff on top of the heritage penthouse and keeping the office building and retail going while we were building. The retailers weren't interested in losing their prime Bloor Street locations for a couple of years, and we had a whole raft of office tenants who also didn't want to move just because we wanted to add floors on top.

I think it's a great concept going forward, and it's one that hopefully people will pursue. There are lots of good examples of places where it could be done. The complexity, the structural gymnastics, all of those issues need to be solved in a creative way, but should it be done again, after having done this? I seriously think so, though it's not easy.

I think that you could do it in a more modest way, if you could clear out the building for the couple of years, then you wouldn't have the complexity and time with threading the needle with the new structure, you could attack and empty the building in way we couldn't. The more efficiency you can create in either the structural system or in how you complete the project would bring the price down, and therefore you don't have to sell the units for that much money and it could become something that would be available to a broader horizon.

Bert Archer is Yonge Street's development news editor.