Message from the TSA Chair

Antonio Gómez-Palacio

Toronto is a concrete city

Michael McClelland and Graeme Stewart

‘I have to say that from the beginning I was fortunate in coming into my practice during the pulsating ’60s of this country’s enormous growth, which offered all sorts of opportunities … One could make experiments. One could find clients wanting to try new things … Sometimes they succeeded and sometimes they didn’t. But it was a very rich, vibrant time we’ve had. And architects everywhere have benefited from that …’

Irving Grossman

The Concrete Toronto publication celebrates the concrete architecture that was built in Toronto in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. This important period was a time of immense prosperity, when considerable public and private investment had a major influence in shaping Canadian cities. But more significantly, we now suffer a cultural amnesia about this period; we remain critical yet uninformed about its architecture and leave its very large impact on our environment without thoughtful assessment.

An appreciation for the architecture of the recent past is a contemporary cultural blind spot. If the making of architecture and the making of cities are inexorably linked, it is clear that the understanding of one requires an understanding of the other. A better appreciation of our recent architectural past gives us greater continuity with the intent, knowledge and ambition of previous generations and a stronger sense of our direction as our city continues to grow.

As we celebrate this architecture, we recognize that it will pose interesting questions about taste, as many of the buildings included in the publication still remain controversial both for architects and the general public.

To open further dialogue, the TSA hosted a group discussion related to these themes at the Arts and Letters Club in February 2008, in the form of a public panel discussion. Participants, all of whom were book contributors, included: Shawn Micallef, of Spacing magazine, EYE Weekly and Murmur, Ian Chodikoff, editor of Canadian Architect Magazine, Marsha Kelmans, Graduate Architect and Urban Designer for the City of Toronto, Adrian Blackwell, artist, writer and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, and David Bowick, partner with Blackwell Bowick Structural Engineers, as well as the book’s Editors.

Concrete city image caption:?

Discussion ranged from the technical and economic factors that favoured concrete design during Toronto’s post war boom, to the internationally significant innovation in architecture design which followed, to how to respond to these buildings today in their continually evolving contexts.

Much focus was placed on Toronto’s icons such as the CN Tower, Manulife Centre, Sheridan Centre, the infamous Robarts Library and MedSci at the University of Toronto. However equal attention was paid to Toronto the vast and remarked post-war communities that stretch as far as the eye can see from Scarborough to Etobicoke; a remarkable inheritance gaining traction amongst Toronto urban thinkers.

Shawn spoke to the captivating optimism modern concrete ‘Sputnik’ architecture had for him as a child coming in to the city from the suburbs - especially the thrill of the winding Don Valley Parkway with it’s modern towers en route to the Ontario Science Centre, not to mention the New City Hall or the CN Tower.

Ian commented on the importance of concrete architecture across Canada, (many examples on their own perhaps rivalling those in Toronto), yet becoming in Toronto itself the city fabric of many post war communities, it has formed the backdrop for the remarkable diversity our changing city has experienced over the past decades, and will continue to define it into the future.

Marsha discussed the modernity of post-war Toronto and how this resonated internationally. That how for many entering Toronto from post-war communities in Europe, particularly the Soviet Union, felt right

at home - from the sprawling towers of Brezhnev’s Moscow, to sprawling Towers of North York. Newcomers instantly understood the open space, the apartment living, the ‘modernity’...the only question, ‘where are the cafes?’.

Adrian spoke to Toronto’s ‘Urban Unconscious’; that while focus is often on the central city, Toronto vast, aging, modern/industrial communities are the focus of much of the city’s poverty, but also contain enormous potential in the 21st century context - much of this cast in concrete.

David spoke to the process of concrete construction and design, the beautiful, but labour intensive process of board forming which defines much from that era. Today the no-nonsense ‘brutal’ aesthetic of efficient city building is experiencing a revival, though now a desired object of high design; with a price to match.

Also in attendance were members of the public, (both professionals and enthusiasts), ranging from Architects Michael Clifford and Don Bolton, key designers for the iconic Manulife Centre, to enthusiastic Ryerson students. Clifford and Bolton reminisced on the practical matters of erecting and planning Canada’s largest residential and mixed use building, while students eagerly contemplated new uses for expressive concrete in contemporary design. Surprising to many, not least of all the editors of the book, the response has mostly been positive – people really do seem to like these buildings.To paraphrase an audience member; “growing up I went to a concrete high school, attended a concrete community centre, and shopped at

Concrete city image caption: ? Concrete city image caption:?

a concrete shopping mall, I really do live in Concrete Toronto’. Looking around, we all do. In a strange way, these buildings are the Toronto vernacular; the nuts and bolts of our big city.There is of course the issue of how we respond to these aging building today?

As artefacts from a by-gone era, divorced from the baggage typically associated with Brutalism, they represent a period of optimistic and confident civic investment and muscular city building, for which, in the context of the many challenges of the 21st Century, their is palpable nostalgia. Our response may well help shape our city’s future.

Michael McClelland and Graeme Stewart of E.R.A. Architects are the editors of Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties and the Seventies. Th ey are also key instigators of the Tower Renewal Project, an initiative re-examining Toronto’s remarkable stock of residential concrete high-rise buildings; their heritage, neighbourhood histories, current place in our city, and future potential in a green and equitable Toronto. Current partners include the City of Toronto, University of Toronto, and CMHC.

Heritage Poster Design Competition

The Toronto Society of Architects organizes and hosts an annual poster competition exploring a theme relating to architecture and design. In 2008, in association with the Design Industry Advisory Committee (DIAC) and Heritage Toronto, the TSA held a design competition to celebrate and to raise awareness for heritage issues. The purpose of the competition was to generate an image that draws attention to the value of our historic and modern built environment, and illustrates how it might be protected and re-used through environmentally-sustainable, economically-beneficial and innovative solutions. Cash prizes were awarded to the three top winners.

The competition was based on the idea that protecting our heritage resources – buildings, structures, landscapes, and neighborhoods – is fundamentally about maintaining a unique sense of place, supporting the cultural and economic vitality of our cities, and improving the health and sustainability of the environments we inhabit. Recognizing that heritage conservation hinges on generating public awareness, the posters created through this competition will be used for this purpose, by the TSA, Heritage Toronto, and by other similar organizations, through exhibits, promotions, and printed materials.

The competition was open to all of the design disciplines, including architects, graphic designers, landscape architects, fashion designers, interior designers, industrial designers, and artists. The top six posters, from a very strong field, are reprinted on the following pages. Congratulations to all the winners of the juried competition.

Concrete city image caption:?

First Place, Anna Robertson, 2008 Second Place, Mariana Grezova, 2008

Th ird Place, Alexandar Janicijevic, 2008 Honourable Mention, Ivan Martinovic, 2008

Honourable Mention, Tyler Rozicki, 2008Honourable Mention, Alexandar Janicijevic, 2008

Food and Cities

Chris Hardwicke

In a time where the slow food movement meets the fast food nation, food, like a mass eating disorder, is suddenly on everyone’s mind. Hungry to be part of the discussion the Toronto Society of Architects hosted a roundtable about food and cities on June 3, 2008. This article extends that June conversation.

Food shapes our culture and our sense of place. It affects the way we do business; the way we socialize; and the places we choose to visit, travel and shop. Food is part of everyday life and survival but it is strangely absent in the way we plan our cities and design our buildings.

Architects have traditionally designed the convivial aspects of eating: flatware, dishes, glasses, dining tables and chairs as well as kitchens, restaurants and dining rooms. Preoccupied with consumption and eating food we have forgotten about production and growing.

When it comes to food our cities are hungry consumers. As cities rely on external regions for food, energy and waste disposal, it’s not surprising that the majority of our ecological footprint comes from food (thirty-one percent) and transportation (twenty-four percent).1 Green buildings and certification programs have become mainstream aspirations for city builders, but new building only amounts to twenty percent of our ecological footprint. Green standards are diets for buildings — focused only on minimizing consumption, not creating productive places.

Cities have always depended on their periphery for sustenance. Historically, civilizations were founded with the coincident development of cultivation and shelter.

Carolyn Steel, in her book Hungry City, outlines the historical connection between food and cities. Growing food required people to stay in one place, band together in communities and inhabit a place. The discovery of grain as a food source made cities possible. Before the industrial age, proximity to arable land determined not only where cities were built, but whether or not they thrived.

Food has played a key role in shaping our civic spaces. The Roman Forum, the Athenian Agora are examples of the world’s greatest public places that were originally food markets. St. Lawrence Market, Kensington Market, Dufferin Grove Park and many new local markets have become the centre of their neighbourhoods. Markets are the heart and soul of civic life, places where people share food and stories, places that are alive with social and economic activity. Although markets have traditionally been the centre of local food distribution, they were also the first sites of distribution for imported goods and globalization. The struggle between the local and the global began when fresh produce sold beside dry good commodity trades of spices, tea and grain.

Our cultural views on food are polarized by corporate and grassroots ideologies. On one side, corporate food systems are being monopolized by seed patents and processed, prepackaged and genetically modified foods that spawn large retailers, big box stores, suburban strips. On the other side there is a resurgence of the local food movement, community gardens, organic food, permaculture, slow food, local grocers, butchers, farmer’s markets and community gardens, kitchens, dinners .

The local and the global can be seen in the diversity of many Toronto neighbourhoods. Roncesvalles, Chinatown, Little India and the Danforth are defined by their food culture and street festivals. In 1963, J. Piccininni, the local alderman for Corso Italia, convinced the City that eating was part of street life and operated the first licensed outdoor café in Toronto.

These neighbourhoods are defined by imported local street cultures and imported global products. The same irony can be seen in our health regulations that allow only hot dogs to be served by street vendors despite our rich multicultural culinary diversity.1. How Big Is Toronto’s Ecological Footprint? Wackernagel et al., 1997.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traced a direct line between the industrialization of our food supply and the degradation of our health, culture and the environment. Climate change and the shortage of oil, food, and water can be traced to our everyday eating habits. Disconnected from growing and distribution our choices are uninformed. The industrialized agricultural system has made food so plentiful and cheap that it has become unvalued.

In Alphabet City 12: Food, Pierre Bélanger and Angela Iarocci describe the bizarre journey of food through airports, factories and highways to giant distribution centres like the Ontario Food Terminal. In Toronto, the average food product travels over 3000 km to get to our plates. This complex system supports the growing dominance of large supermarkets in the sourcing, production and distribution of food. Food is shaping our cities as powerfully as ever but we don’t see it happening.

Despite the abundance of cheap and plentiful food, the networks of food distribution leave food deserts in Toronto. Food deserts are areas of the city that don’t have access to healthy food choices within a reasonable distance, a twenty-minute walk. By design, these deserts overlap with the Toronto’s lower income priority neighbourhoods. Nina-Marie Lister, also in Alphabet City 12: Food, outlines the problem: retailers avoid neighbourhoods that are populated with people that have lower access to transportation and less income to spend on food. So the people that need food security most have fewer healthy food choices.

Toronto is fortunate to have strong community programs like The Stop Community Food Centre, Foodshare, the Toronto Food Policy Council and Evergreen.

Recently, architects and planners have begun recognizing food as a major issue in city planning and building. Ryerson University hosted a symposium called The Role of Food and Agriculture in the Design and Planning of Buildings and Cities where we learned about a wide range of initiatives that are in the works. Andre Viljoen has lead the way with research for a book called Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs) that proposes finding a way for urban agriculture to permeate our cities.

Locally, Joe Lobko is working on two projects, Brickworks and Wychwood Barns, that have substantial urban agriculture components. Steven Teeple’s Giraffe condo and the 60 Richmond Co-operative building both integrate productive gardens into dense residential forms. Other visionary proposals for urban agriculture include, skyfarm, vertical farms and my own project Farm-City (see links below).

Between 1976 and 1996, the GTA lost sixty-two thousand hectares of farmland to development, with another forty thousand hectares designated for development. It is projected that by the year 2026, forty percent of all agricultural land in the GTA will have been lost to development.

Image: Food deserts of Toronto, Chris Hardwicke

Despite this, the land use implications of food systems are not being addressed in our city. Currently, in the City of Toronto, there is no zoning for agricultural uses. Land values within cities relegate garden spaces to marginal sites, and city dwellers are increasingly trying to persuade the city to give them space for growing crops. As our population grows, our food production will have a greater impact on land use and the landscape. Urban agriculture will become increasingly important as agricultural lands become scarce.

Food is one of life’s basic necessities, but also one of life’s greatest pleasures. Urban agriculture helps conserve soils and minimize waste. It also improves microclimate, nutrient recycling, water management, biodiversity and CO2 balance. Most importantly, it makes food production part of our culture by making gardens visible and allowing us to participate in our own sustenance.

As an associate at Sweeny Sterling Finlayson &Co Architects Inc. Chris Hardwicke researches, designs, teaches, gives advice, makes policies and writes about places and cities. His visionary urban projects have been exhibited and published widely.

Image: Urban Agricultural Project, Designs of the Time Festival, 2007

An exhibition & panel discussion at the IIDEX trade exhibition from September 25th -26th, 2008

An exhibition, panel discussion, and public events at the Royal Ontario Museum from November 5th, 2008 to January 11th, 2009

This fall the Toronto Society of Architects presents “Unbuilt Toronto : The City That Could Have Been”, an exhibition that reveals the Toronto that might have been, through projects that never were. The exhibition will be part of a series of events in the fall-winter of 2008 that will stimulate a dialogue on the ‘Unbuilt Toronto.’

The preview exhibition, shown at IIDEX from September 25th to September 26th, will feature images taken from the forthcoming book Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been, by Mark Osbaldeston. A feature panel discussion at IIDEX will discuss significant but never-realized projects from Toronto’s past, providing a new and often surprising look at Canada’s largest city.

From towers to subways, highways to whole neighbourhoods, Unbuilt Toronto will look at a number of proposals that either never made it off the drawing board or were constructed in altered or truncated form. The panel will be moderated by Jane Farrow (Executive Director, Center for City Ecology) and will include Ken Greenberg (Greenberg Consulting), Michael McClelland (ERA Architects) and Mark Osbaldeston (author of Unbuilt Toronto:). The exhibition will also coincide with the launch of

Image: Model of the Toronto Eaton Centre, 1966

the call for submission from architects, landscape architects and urban designers for the subsequent Unbuilt Toronto exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, opening November 5th, 2008.

The exhibition at the ROM will feature images taken from Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been displayed alongside a juried selection of unrealized projects submitted by architects and designers from across the GTA. The exhibition launch and book launch will be held at the Royal Ontario Museum on November 4th from 6:30pm to 9:30pm. We encourage you to visit www.unbuilttoronto.ca for submission information and forthcoming information on future Unbuilt Toronto events.

UNBUILT TORONTO: THE CITY THAT COULD HAVE BEEN