***Waterfront Development Thread***

[Taller, Better]

Originally Posted by Filip

Those hippie bastards deserve jet engine noise :P

Lucky KGB is not around!

[MissyC]

Originally Posted by Taller, Better

Pleasure! I encourage everyone to hop on a streetcar, bus or subway, and get down to the waterfront to discover it. Be a tourist in your own city and find out what is already there. The photos I've shown are only a small snippet, the same thing extends to the west of downtown; and then add on top of that our largest urban park, the Toronto Islands. We are extremely lucky to be living on a huge lake, with a lovely shoreline and natural sand beaches. Nothing is nicer on a Sunday than to go to the beach, or the Scarborough Bluffs, and sit by the water.

if you ever need some fun company, one who also loves to bike and get around and explore new places, being newbe in town too, just ask me!!!

I ll make sandwiches and you bring the wine and we go watch skylines, bike, hang out the tourist in our own city and take pictures of both buildings and handsome boys!

[Taller, Better]

I'm sure we will!

[MissyC]

Originally Posted by Taller, Better

I'm sure we will!

Sounds lovely

And we can have a lovely rendez-vous with Isaidso, Looking/Up and Elk at Panorama restaurant and enjoy the views.

[WrightTurn]

Originally Posted by Taller, Better

Lucky KGB is not around!

Where did he go anyway? Traveling?

[Taller, Better]

Dunno. We've lost a good one, though. No one could cut through the crap like KGB.

[WrightTurn]

Originally Posted by Taller, Better

Dunno. We've lost a good one, though. No one could cut through the crap like KGB.

Well...I dunno...when it came to the States he dished out enough of it himself.

But a great eye for Toronto nonetheless.

[Taller, Better]

He was famous for breaking a lot of eggs to make an omelette! I think everyone ran afoul of KGB at least once or twice. The maddening thing was that he was almost always correct!

[WrightTurn]

Originally Posted by Taller, Better

He was famous for breaking a lot of eggs to make an omelette! I think everyone ran afoul of KGB at least once or twice. The maddening thing was that he was almost always correct!

He lost me with a comment to the effect that New York had no artists in it anymore and that Manhattan was somehow less creative than Queen Street. As I work in New York specifically because of the arts, I can tell you this isn't true no matter how you slice it.

The whole "America = irredeemable eeeeeeeeeeeeeevil" thing got a bit old.

[Taller, Better]

Okay, fair enough. Back to Waterfront!

[Elkhanan1]

By androiduk on UT.

Sherbourne Common




Sugar Beach splash pad

[Elkhanan1]

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Lisa Rochon: Cityspace

Sugar Beach: pink umbrellas, green cubes, lingering questions

Toronto’s new Sugar Beach is fab, but the boxy Corus Entertainment headquarters beside it is
corporate and clunky. And just down the road, the planned Bayside neighbourhood feels uninspired.

[IMG]http://i35.************/213r9xs.jpg[/IMG]
Sugar Beach yields an impressionistic landscape rarely attempted
in the hard-edged cities of North America. Sarah Dea/The Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1679881/


Lisa Rochon

From Saturday's Globe and Mail


Blurred, soft, faint and flowing: Flou is a French word of such import that it should be a required addition
to the English language. Because Toronto’s new Sugar Beach is flou, it yields an impressionistic landscape
rarely attempted in the hard-edged cities of North America.

Don’t confuse the pale pink umbrellas rising from the cream-coloured sand as design weakness.
The advantage of flou – besides allowing for willow trees, granite rock and pink parasols to be read as
sensory touchstones of colour and texture – is that it emphasizes the rigidity of Corus Entertainment
corporate headquarters constructed next door.

It’s a bit like spying Jackie Kennedy sheathed in shell-pink chiffon and sparkling sequins sitting next to Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a shapeless black suit. On a tiny, two-acre (eight-tenths of a hectare) park on
Toronto’s central waterfront, Montreal’s Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes has accomplished a
mesmerizing distraction from the dark green mask of Corus.

Such is the unsettling truth of the central waterfront as it is being currently rolled out – beautiful moments in
its new public space marred by the construction of ordinary architecture.

[IMG]http://i36.************/n2oj1g.jpg[/IMG]
The headquarters of Corus Entertainment: sustainable, clunky design. Sarah Dea/The Globe and Mail

The chunky green-glass Corus building was one of those Waterfront Toronto cloak-and-dagger secrets, once
referred to mysteriously and misleadingly as Project Symphony. Its architect, Jack Diamond of Diamond + Schmitt,
had been hired without a design competition by the Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO),
a city agency that owns more than 60 per cent of the 1,000 acres in the city’s downtown brownfields known as
the Portlands. Diamond had previously worked as a consultant for TEDCO on the precinct plan for East Bayfront,
just next door to Toronto’s Harbourfront.

Given that Diamond has made a career of creating buildings designed to fit into the streetscape rather than express
something individualistic or exuberant, the match was made in heaven: Emotional architecture is not what TEDCO,
wanted. Flou? Feed it to the seagulls. In its wisdom, TEDCO – representing the Toronto taxpayer – wanted something
glassy and generic.

Why? “The market pays for view. View was paramount,” says project architect David Dow. Still, was it really necessary
to promote something this indistinguishable on one of the city’s grand-finale waterfront sites? “It had to be a generic
enough office building that it could satisfy other tenants in the future,” explains Dow. Imagine for yourself the hint of
regret in his voice.

In response, Diamond + Schmitt created two glass office buildings linked by an atrium. Hardly a jewel, but, nevertheless,
a competent design solution. The glass is dark green – not the golden colour of glass kissed by the sun, as it appeared
in one of the earlier renderings from 2007. It’s sustainable, smart design; but to the eye, it’s a corporate clunker.

Corus Entertainment is one of Canada’s largest media-and-entertainment companies, owners of radio stations Q107
and The Edge, animation house Nelvana and Kids Can Press. Its new office and broadcast centre is planned for
completion in late September, although a majority of its 1,200 employees has already moved here from disparate sites
across the city.

In the earlier renderings, there’s a groovy permeability to the headquarters: The big glass doors on the building’s west
side are opened wide, allowing masses of people, gathered on the stone promenade and sitting on the massive Sugar
Beach hump of a rock, to look in at the TV studios. You can almost picture Lady Gaga arriving to flaunt her latest headdress.

But for now, the ground-floor glass is sheathed in some kind of reflective, anti-ballistic coating, so it’s difficult to see in.
It would be delightful if the monumental sliding doors facing the lake would regularly expose the building to the winds and
the sounds of the water – alas, and I hope that Corus proves me wrong, that’s unlikely, given security concerns. The tiny
café at the north of the building, meanwhile, is too narrow and, during the morning rush, overcrowded.

Still, the sense of flou resonates powerfully, thanks to Waterfront Toronto, in the public spaces around the Corus building.
Double allées of maple trees and timber benches by Dutch landscape magicians West 8 now grace part of the East Bayfront
promenade. A restaurant with breathtaking views along the waterfront edge of the building is still to come. And tiny
motorized fish, by fantastic British design firm Troika, running the length of the ceiling in a public corridor inside Corus,
are about to be turned on.

The building interior is being outfitted by Quadrangle Architects and is stoked with walls clad in wood recycled from the old
Queen Elizabeth docks. What could have been an airy atrium, with clear views to the waterfront and a living green wall,
is being clogged with stuff: a boxy recording studio; and a multistorey, careening tube slide for the daring employees of Corus.

But let’s slip from the interior, privatized world of Corus and head outside and slightly east to Bayside, the largest new
residential neighbourhood along Toronto’s waterfront, poised to begin construction. Waterfront Toronto announced this week
that an American development-and-design consortium has won the bid to build out the largest development parcels in
East Bayfront, comprised of 10 acres between Lower Sherbourne and Parliament streets.

Hines, a large international real-estate firm, has partnered with American architect Cesar Pelli (renowned for his sky-scratching
towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) and Stanton Eckstut, one of the master-plan consultants of New York City’s Battery
Park City waterfront development. Adamson Architects are the local affiliates.

The Hines-Pelli consortium was favoured by a committee that included Waterfront Toronto CEO John Campbell and the city’s
deputy city manager, Richard Butts. I’m not exactly sure why. The financials, which are strictly confidential, must have seriously
impressed, because the design itself is largely polite and formulaic but uninspired.

That design got the go-ahead despite the fact that an independent committee of experts, struck to review the proposed
revitalization design, heavily favoured a competing submission. That vision – featuring smaller commercial buildings and glass
residential studios engaged in an urban dance – was produced by homeboy architects Peter Clewes and Bruce Kuwabara,
who joined forces with Walker Corporation of Australia and Cityzen Development Corporation (currently building the Marilyn
Monroesque tower in Mississauga). In their report, the committee recommended the locally produced scheme for its permeability
and heightened sense of Toronto, including lovely slips of water cut from the lake into the mainland.

Unforgivably, the process leading up to the naming, this week, of the winning Bayside development partner has been shrouded
in secrecy. All players – including all consultants – have been required by Waterfront Toronto to sign confidentiality agreements,
provoking secret, hushed exchanges of information. Officially, I don’t know anything.

Bayside is the largest residential development to plant itself on Toronto’s waterfront in decades. But, though it spreads over
publicly owned land, none of its new residential designs have been seen or debated by the public. Keeping the Toronto waterfront
as a secret harboured by only a very few is an old idea that smacks of Toronto in the 1980s. Definitely not flou, just tragically,
dangerously passé.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1679881/

[isaidso]

Peter Clewes/Bruce Kuwabara designs bore me to tears while Corus is a massive disappointment. “It had to be a generic enough office building that it could satisfy other tenants in the future"? Good god! What about beautiful enough to attract future tenants!

Let's hope this Hines-Pelli consortium can do a lot better. If it's anything like what Clewes/Kuwabara thinks is engaging or as mind numbing as the Corus building, this whole development will be a massive lost opportunity.

[Elkhanan1]

Originally Posted by isaidso

Peter Clewes/Bruce Kuwabara designs bore me to tears while Corus is a massive disappointment. “It had to be a generic enough office building that it could satisfy other tenants in the future"? Good god! What about beautiful enough to attract future tenants!

Let's hope this Hines-Pelli consortium can do a lot better. If it's anything like what Clewes/Kuwabara thinks is engaging or as mind numbing as the Corus building, this whole development will be a massive lost opportunity.

Corus Quay was designed by Diamond + Schitt not aA (Peter Clewes) or KPMB ( Bruce Kuwabara).

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by Elkhanan1

Corus Quay was designed by Diamond + Schitt not aA (Peter Clewes) or KPMB ( Bruce Kuwabara).

I was referring to the article above. I probably shouldn't have put those 2 separate thoughts in the same sentence, I suppose.

[Elkhanan1]

By dt_toronto_geek on UT.

An afternoon at the wonderful Sugar Beach. I was surprised at how busy it was, which is great.

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[Taller, Better]

Wow, they really did do a lot more work there before the official "opening date". People really love this new beach. Very nice! Thanks for posting.

[Elkhanan1]

By androiduk on UT.

Sherbourne Common under construction just down the road from Sugar Beach.

[Mollywood]

I walked by Sherbourn Common a few minutes ago and it's looking pretty good. When it's finished, there will be water everywhere. There are 3 large concrete boxes, which look to be covered in silver, bubbled metal, on the sides. The concrete ledge is big enough to sit on. Each box looks like it will function as a fountain and has a part cut out, where the water will fall down to the canal. The canal is not like a regular canal. It has a step before the bottom. Is that for people to sit on and put their feet in the canal? Either way, with all that water flowing, it will be very nice on hot days. Right beside the coffee shop, there will also be a huge spash pad, just in case people need more water. I can't wait to see how it looks with the waterfalls flowing down to that canal.

[Elkhanan1]

Pics?