cityscape
The Province Announces Designers for Ontario Place’s New Park
Two design firms will collaborate on a new 7.5-acre public park at Ontario Place.
Photo by Russell Sutherland from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
In June, the province announced that Ontario Place—which has been closed since February 2012—would be getting a 7.5-acre “moderate park,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Specifics are still few and far between, but we know, at least, the names of the firms that will be designing that park. In a press release this morning, the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport announced that LANDinc and West 8, two design firms with international resumés, will be in charge of figuring out how the new green space should look. A first public consultation on the project is scheduled for December 4, at 6 p.m. It will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Still unknown, in all of this, is what will become of the rest of Ontario Place. The park will cover only a small fraction of the site. Back in 2012, John Tory’s advisory panel recommended mixed-use development with lots of public space, but Queen’s Park doesn’t necessarily need to adhere to that suggestion.
The ministry says it hopes to have the park completed by 2015, in time for Toronto’s Pan Am Games.