The race to build a Pan Am Games village has begun
20 November 2009
The Globe and Mail
With the recent announcement that Toronto will host the 2015 Pan American Games, the ongoing transformation of Hogtown's lakeside wastelands into living urban fabric may have gotten a serious kick in the right direction. Or maybe not. A great deal remains to be seen. I'll set out my apprehensions in a moment. But here are the facts.
Staging the event will require a secure central location where 8,500 athletes and officials from across the Pan American world can live comfortably, train, practise and relax for the duration of the games. The winning bid included a scheme, drafted by the Toronto firm regionalArchitects, for a new, purpose-built village to house this large group of people. (The designers estimate that the Pan Am village will house a population three times the size of the crowd of competitors expected to turn out for Vancouver's 2010 Olympics.) This mixed-use development will go up in the now-vacant West Don Lands, one of the parcels overseen by Waterfront Toronto, the crown corporation charged with turning former industrial properties into livable pieces of city.
Crafted by regionalArchitects' John van Nostrand and Drew Sinclair, the village plan is interesting in its attempt to offer workable solutions, in a single architectural package, to two different problems. The first is the housing of athletes and staff for the short time of the games, and the second is the long-term provision of dwellings for Torontonians.
The village scheme features buildings of two general types. One is temporary, and will cost about $50-million. The large common dining hall (a tented structure), the welcome centre and other components useful only during the games will be demolished after their conclusion. A 50-metre swimming pool will be relocated elsewhere in the Golden Horseshoe after the event, and a swatch of playing fields and practice areas located south of the east-west railway corridor, which bounds the site on one side, will be returned to Waterfront Toronto for future development as a residential neighbourhood.
The other construction in the West Don Lands – the main focus of the estimated $1-billion in public financing to be poured into the site – is to be permanent. The mid-rise apartment blocks and townhouses, stretched along an extension of Front Street East that will end at the new Don River Park, will shelter the athletes and staff during the games. Afterwards, Mr. Sinclair said in an interview, the bunks in the buildings will be converted into apartments priced across the “spectrum of affordable housing.” After the athletes have moved on, there will be room for about 4,000 permanent residents.
I appreciate the ambition that went into the plan prepared for the Pan Am Games committee. I like the team's renderings of what their Pan Am village might look like, with raking, saucy rooflines and colourful facades.
My hesitation about this scheme comes partly from the fact that, at the present time, nobody knows what the village will look like. Mr. van Nostrand and Mr. Sinclair only prepared a proposal that helped Toronto's pitch to win; they will not be in charge of the execution of the village.
“Individual parcels will be let out to different developers and providers of affordable housing, with their own architects and planners,” Mr. van Nostrand said. These architects will probably not create something truly awful, since Waterfront Toronto will be guiding the design process according to rules that have been painstakingly worked out over the past several years. (Waterfront Toronto's guidelines regarding height, size of footprint, building envelope and other technical matters were honoured in regionalArchitects' plan, Mr. van Nostrand said.)
But those rules were meant to be implemented over decades – not in a scant five years. What's to prevent haste from making a mess of things? In the rush to have everything in the village ready for 2015, design quality could be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. With the pressure of time on them, the yet-to-be-named architects and builders will surely be tempted to trim the construction budgets to the minimum, eliminating refinements that should be part and parcel of every new development on the waterfront.
The West Don Lands territory is an immense asset and opportunity that must not be squandered by quick-build developers interested only in reaping a windfall off the $1-billion public investment in the Pan Am village.
In the run-up to the Pan American Games, Toronto has been given something new to worry about: a possible hitch in Waterfront Toronto's efforts to bring urban vitality to the water, which have seemed so promising until now.