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Building On A Bad Reputation
ERA Architects Installation. Photo by Tom Bilenkey, courtesy of Harbourfront Centre.
Toronto’s reputation as a city bent upon destroying its past is well-deserved. But an exhibit at Harbourfront Centre suggests that this reputation is becoming a thing of the past. Given the opportunity to reflect upon history’s place in architectural practice, in “Building on History,” three of the city’s leading firms provide remarkable insight into how architects think about heritage and value heritage buildings in different ways.
A structure that existed in 1858 at 145 Dundas Street West. Photo by Kevin Plummer.
The title of the E.R.A. Architects Inc. contribution to the exhibit, “Found Toronto,” is of course a play on Lost Toronto (Oxford UP, 1978), historian William Dendy’s elegiac volume that helped galvanize the city’s conservation movement. Where Dendy presented dozens of examples of demolished heritage buildings, “Found Toronto” shows us just how much of the old city remains. In a small room, a huge reproduction of the 1858 Boulton Atlas—one of the city’s earliest maps—adorns an entire wall. On the opposite wall, a collection of present-day snapshots of historical buildings challenge visitors to literally pinpoint their location on the 1858 map.
Among the snapshots, there are buildings whose heritage status is obvious as you walk past them on the street, such as Trinity Square or St. Stephen-in-the-Fields. But there are also dozens of more modest survivors—houses and commercial buildings that don’t stand-out in the contemporary streetscape, such as 145 Dundas Street West or 298 Queen Street West—which was already the Black Bull back in 1858 (though it was rebuilt in 1886). Altogether, the exhibit offers an intriguing way of connecting visitors with a very different city from long ago.
While E.R.A. contemplates the built heritage that remains, the Goldsmith Borgal & Company Ltd. Architects contribution, “Take 2,” highlights how heritage structures in Toronto have been adaptively re-used. After an overview of major retrofitting projects that’ve taken place in Toronto—and an invitation for visitors to doodle their own additions—”Take 2″ showcases GBCA’s own work. With copious photographs and sparse words, the selection of GBCA projects illustrate the different options that exist for re-thinking, renovating, and re-using old buildings. The display shows hows, at its best, adaptive reuse incorporates contemporary architectural elements by grafting steel and glass onto heritage buildings like the terrific National Ballet School on Jarvis Street. Turning the North Toronto Station into an LCBO, and the re-purposing of the Don Valley Brickworks are also pointed to as creative restorations. On the other hand, the more controversial practice of restoring only ornamental elements of a heritage building’s façade—as GBCA is doing by incorporating the National Building (1926) into the new Bay-Adelaide Centre—leaves visitors to decide for themselves which forms of adaptive reuse are most successful.
Taylor Hazell Architects Installation. Photo by Tom Bilenkey, courtesy of Harbourfront Centre.
Evaluating the options for adaptive reuse is only the first step of an architectural process that is sensitive to historical settings. In the exhibit’s next installation, Taylor Hazell Architects Ltd. provides fascinating insight into the firm’s approach to the design of a single project, a national headquarters and monastery extension for the Redemptorist Order commissioned in 2006 but never built. Unlike many adaptive reuse projects, Taylor Hazell’s design proposals had to be doubly sensitive when exploring ideas for the project. First, heritage considerations included the fact that the client—the Catholic Church—had continuously occupied the site, on the northeast corner of Dundas and McCaul streets, since St. Patrick’s was built in the mid-1800s. Second, the architectural proposals had to fit within the ethic of the Redemptorist Order, which requires brothers to take a vow of poverty. A sample brick wall erected in the exhibition space illustrates Taylor Hazell’s idea for a curving, wavy brick wall on the street-side elevation of Redemptorist buidling. It would’ve blended bold architectural flourish with the rectangular shapes of the existing structures without compromising the required simplicity of design.
Because this design depended on the consistency of bricks between old and new elements on the site, it also illustrates some of the unique difficulties to be overcome while working with heritage buildings. Finding the required Ontario-size buff bricks had became supremely difficult after the last manufacturer in the United States discontinued the product in 2003. This put many of the conservation of heritage structures requiring this sort of brick, like the R.C. Harris Water Filtration Plant, into jeopardy. Taylor Hazell found a local bricksworks in the village of Paisley that, after two years of trial and error research, was finally able to produce a suitable substitute brick for the filtration plant and Redemptorist building. The Taylor Hazell installation offers fascinating insight into how thoughtful and heartfelt many architects are in dealing with heritage considerations.
This stands in contrast to the housing developers referenced in the final portion of the exhibit, “Elegy for a Stolen Land.” Here documentary photographer Peter Sibbald contemplates the gravesites, villages, and settler farmsteads are ploughed under and built over with new subdivisions, except in rare instances when archaeological findings are significant enough to derail development. “Building on History” runs at the Harbourfront Centre until June.