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Brown Moving Down
Students of George Brown College are about to get some premium lakefront property.
Waterfront Toronto has announced that the college will build a new campus within the upcoming East Bayfront development on a .83 hectare (two-acre) site at the south side of Queens Quay Boulevard, flanked by Lower Jarvis and Lower Sherbourne [map]. The centre is scheduled for completion by 2011, and will house George Brown’s Centre for Health Sciences. According to George Brown President Anne Sado, the school has been looking for a site to expand the Health Sciences faculty for some time.
Tangible enthusiasm for the revitalization of this industrial strip began with the competition to redesign the Jarvis Slip future public square. That contest was ultimately awarded to Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes for their Sugar Beach proposal (Cormier co-designed the popular—and very similar—HTO Park at Harbourfront).
The East Bayfront scheme includes TEDCO’s controversial First Waterfront Place, now under construction, which will be the new headquarters of Corus Entertainment. Preliminary renderings of the George Brown College facility are extremely vague, but Waterfront Toronto has mandated a strong focus on design excellence for the area.
25% of the East Bayfront plan is to feature parkland and open public areas, 230,000 square metres (2.5 milliion square feet) of commercial and industrial space, and 6,000 residential units, 1,200 of which will be “affordable rental housing.”
This month, Waterfront Toronto will solicit design proposals for the development’s Parkside community, followed by Requests for Proposals for the Bayside community in September.