Results tagged “architecture”

The Edgewater Hotel sign is gone. City officials ordered that the Parkdale landmark be removed on November 3, after nearly three years of working to convince the owner of the building to which it was attached to make necessary repairs. According to a Municipal Licensing and Standards manager, the sign had finally become so derelict that city inspectors deemed it unsafe.

Amidst the brouhaha about fare increases at this month's TTC meeting, one thing that was overlooked was the approval of the design for a Highway 407 station [PDF] on the new Spadina subway extension. Except—they haven't really decided on the finer points of the design. Did we say "finer points"? We meant "all of it."

Last night's episode of the increasingly addictive Being Erica sent its eponymous protagonist ten years into the future, where she proclaimed that 2019 was pretty similar to 2009. And indeed it was, save for a bad haircut and a few subtle embellishments that we're really looking forward to a decade from now.

What is this? Is it: a. an underground moon base; b. a strange Japanese children's TV programme; c. two vacuum-cleaner attachments in a pistol duel, or; d. the new design for Steeles West Station on the Spadina subway extension?

       

Despite all the drama Bridgepoint Health (and the Don Jail) went through between Doors Open and now, they broke ground right on schedule just this past Monday and put the wheels in motion to build the new Bridgepoint Hospital with the adjacent old Don Jail being repurposed as a research and administration facility.

"It's all about U," one of the billboards screamed. Earlier this month, that was one of the slogans plastered on large boards surrounding a sparse parking lot at Bay and St. Mary's streets. The spot set to sprout the gleaming towers of U Condominiums sits beside the historic St. Basil's Church and is marketed as the "singularly exceptional" choice for urban dwellers. Of course it is. Forget the church. Forget the students traipsing past, who can barely afford rent. It's all about U! (The mammoth sign saying as much has since been taken down, but U's website still uses the catchphrase.)

This Thursday, the Toronto Transit Commission will sit down to approve conceptual layouts for York University and Sheppard West, two of the new stations on the future Spadina subway extension. The details are outlined in the meeting's agenda, and some of the more significant points in the plans are after the jump.

She was crowned with her towering spire on April 2, 1975, rising nearly six hundred metres above the Toronto waterfront. A year and a half later, on October 1, 1976, her doors were opened to the public for the very first time, the jewel of the skyline and a beacon to the world—and to anyone with misplaced bearings in the downtown core.

Yesterday, while diehard TIFF-goers were well into their second screenings, Torontoist was getting a preview of the future of the festival: the Bell Lightbox. Spanning the northwest corner of King and John, the enormous 175,000-square-foot space already feels like TIFF Central, despite being at present uniformly grey, dusty, and full of building materials. Artistic Director Noah Cowan, who has encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly every detail of the project, has been shuttling media through for the past few weeks, trying to promote fundraising efforts, which is paying off. After hearing what's in store for the Lightbox, it's no wonder benefactors are coming forward.

Down on the waterfront at Queen's Quay, between Lower Sherbourne and Lower Jarvis, lies the site of George Brown College's new $175 million dentistry and healthcare campus. The project was just given approval for ground-breaking yesterday, and will form part of the new development on East Bayfront.

       

The Institute for Contemporary Culture (ICC) at the ROM recently unveiled newly constructed walls in the Roloff Beny Gallery on the fourth floor of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Nine brand new, soaring walls vary in height and angle to create a series of forms. Together, they produce a dialogue with the existing architecture and aim to enhance experiential variety for the visitor. The newly configured gallery space will launch on September 26 with the exhibition Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913–2008.

Many Torontonians are unaware that Chinatown East even exists, let alone that a significant landmark—almost a decade in the making—opened last week at Gerrard and Broadview. The Zhong Hua Men ("Chinese Arch") brings a higher profile to Chinatown East, and gives the district a gateway that its famous cousin on Spadina surprisingly doesn't have.

Back in May, when the Metro Central YMCA announced they were planning a green roof to accompany other repairs, it was an idea that made sense: the rooftop running track was a flat, ugly expanse of hot concrete, and certainly not much to look at from the surrounding condo towers. Originally intended as a outdoor terrace for exercising and lounging, it barely served the purpose—it was much more comfortable to run on the air-conditioned interior track, and with nowhere to sit on the hard surface, the area didn't lend itself to yoga classes, stretching, or even a nice place to read a book.

After a building boom altered the Toronto skyline over the course of the late 1920s, construction ground to a standstill during the Great Depression. Annual spending on construction, which had peaked at $51.5 million in 1928, dropped to a mere $4.5 million in 1933. The few projects that weren't cancelled or disrupted were initiated mostly by banks and insurance companies seeking symbolic structures that emphasized institutional stability through turbulent times and faith in an economic turnaround.

Remember this sculpture? It disappeared from the TD Centre plaza last year. It consisted of enormous curved bronze slabs set across from one another to form a ring. There were three large, bronze chairs arranged around the outside of the ring. The title of the sculpture was The Ring. Which seems appropriate.

In our first-ever joint live chat with Torontoist partner the Globe and Mail, Donald Schmitt, of Diamond+Schmitt Architects (Museum subway station, the Four Seasons Centre, Jerusalem City Hall), fielded reader questions ranging from the hue of Museum Station to the importance of infrastructure investment. Toronto is "certainly not a pretty place," he said in response to one question, "but it has vitality."

We at Torontoist are big fans of: architecture, urban design, using technology to facilitate interesting conversations, and, of course, Toronto. It is thus with great pleasure that we will be simultaneously co-presenting, along with our partner the Globe and Mail, a live chat with architect Donald Schmitt, of Diamond+Schmitt Architects, at 1:30 p.m. today. (The firm's résumé includes the Four Seasons Centre and the redesigned Museum subway station, which is about as wide a range of styles as we can imagine.) The subject: Toronto architects going global. Local firms are gaining increasing prominence internationally, and we will discuss the whys and wherefores. You can submit questions here on Torontoist once the chat is underway, or if you're an eager beaver, post them in the comments section of the Globe's article here.

These three local towers were...

       

The Rees WaveDeck—part of Waterfront Toronto's Central Waterfront transformation project and one of four WaveDecks due to be completed along the harbourfront—opened quietly last week, without the fanfare that accompanied the opening of the Simcoe WaveDeck in June. The Rees WaveDeck lacks the exciting curves of its sibling to the west east: it dips just once, sloping gracefully towards the water in the centre. Sitting next to HTO park and facing neat rows of sailing boats and canoes, the deck feels peaceful and composed.

              

If you've never been to a library opening before you might be surprised to realize that they tend to attract crowds. At yesterday's reopening of the Bloor/Gladstone branch, for instance, a throng of eager readers was waiting in the rain a half-hour before they were to be let inside, and once the doors did open it took twenty minutes for the line to clear. Kids ran downstairs to check out their colourful new play areas, longtime patrons set off to find the new locations of their old favourite sections, and the social butterflies settled into the sparkling computer lab for a status update or two. You could hardly blame them: they'd been without their library for nearly three years, and the enthusiasm with which the branch was welcomed back was delightful to behold.

Standing on the industrial site known as East Bayfront, which extends from Jarvis to Parliament streets and south from the rail lines to Lake Ontario, Mayor David Miller addressed a crowd gathered in the rain on Thursday morning to witness the groundbreaking of Sherbourne Park.

Toronto Life Square—the massively unattractive ogre on the north-east corner of Yonge and Dundas, which houses not only a Future Shop, Google's local offices, and an AMC that uncomfortably doubles as Ryerson classrooms, but also a vast and ever-growing pool of all of our tears—is "broke," according to the Globe and Mail. What's more: Toronto Life, who scooped up the naming rights in 2007, "has been locked in a months-long legal dispute to remove its name from the project." (Perhaps the magazine finally realized the irony of suggesting that the building that loomed over Dundas Square added anything to Toronto life.) The Globe notes that, under the building's original owners, a subsidiary of PenEquity, it racked up some $280 million in debt, and has now been placed in receivership, meaning that it'll soon change ownership but not, unfortunately, disappear altogether. That fate will, for now, remain confined to the dreams of those who want to believe Toronto could have done so much better.

It's not often you see a textile artist take part in an architectural exhibit. But Thea Haines's installation fits perfectly at Building for the Economy, the latest in Harbourfront Centre's series of untraditional and interdisciplinary architecture shows. Dispelling the notion that an economic downturn need only spell doom and gloom, her repurposing of tea towels and napkins of all types and colours—some still stained—suggests we rethink what we consider luxury versus necessity and return to a time when "making do" was common. The recession can, Haines suggests, provide artists and designers opportunities to seek beauty in frugality. That each piece of linen is embroidered with a single letter to spell out synonyms for "save" that are both contemporary ("scrimp") and archaic ("stint") suggests looking to the past to solve present-day concerns. These are all themes addressed by the three participating architectural firms.

The Eglinton was the grandest of Toronto's Art Deco movie houses. People from all over Toronto flocked to Eglinton near Avenue Road for the grand opening showing of King of Burlesque. Kaplan and Sprachman, the prolific pair who would design over one hundred cinemas in Canada, won the Governor General's architecture award for the building in 1937: although it was asymmetrical, its elegant design and fine interior detailing invested a trip to the movies with an aura of sophistication, its defining feature the colourful, neon-lit marquee that's been a neighbourhood icon for generations.

Just weeks after City Hall's executive committee approved yet another lengthy analysis of the future of the Gardiner Expressway, a notable design firm has introduced a fresh concept into the twenty-plus-year-old debate. At last week's tenth annual ideaCity, Les Klein, founding partner of Quadrangle Architects, called for building a green roof on top of the roadway, complete with parkland, cafés, and bike paths stretching from Dufferin Street to the Don Valley Parkway. His proposal for the Gardiner, which was met with a standing ovation, demonstrated that thinking way outside the box might be the best way to move forward from this highly cyclical discussion.

It isn't every day that you go out in search of a story and come back wearing another person's shoes. This, however, is the fate that befell Torontoist photographer Andrew Louis yesterday, in the halls of the newly renovated Royal Conservatory. Torontoist was there to preview the refurbished and expanded centre of all things musical, and since parts of it are still under construction, at a certain point we were required to trade in our kicks for steel-toed boots. (And also to don construction hats. Conservatory staff in attendance were even trained in adjusting the hats to fit our heads, which we found a remarkably deft touch.) And upon our return...lo! Missing shoes!

This morning marked the official opening of the Simcoe WaveDeck, the latest milestone in the ambitious central waterfront transformation. In total, four of these curvy, boardwalk-meets-bridge structures will be open by 2012, each at the base of a major waterfront street. The award-winning Spadina WaveDeck opened late last summer, the Rees WaveDeck is on schedule for a launch later this season, and the Parliament WaveDeck is working its way through the design development phase. Aptly named, each WaveDeck is a variation of a multi-layered, undulating ribbon of wood, rising as tall as six feet above the ground and dipping to almost skim the water's surface.