Toronto’s contemporary architecture provides a visual feast for the city’s many visitors. Our Globetrotter takes in the sights and delights of Canada’s coolest creative hub
Toronto is in the running for the city with the world’s best contemporary architecture. Thanks to our knowledgeable guide and friend, Dana Kalczak, that is my conclusion after a glorious weekend in this beautiful Ontario city. Dana is a graduate of the University of Toronto School of Architecture, as is current Dean, George Baird. His background obviously helped shape the university’s own stunning new buildings.
Take the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy’s Apotex Atrium, designed by Norman Foster. The C$75 million (€49m/£38m) structure at the corner of College Street and Queen’s Park Crescent is one sunlit block of Luxembourg glass and black granite. The unique feature – something none of us had ever seen – is a four-floor open atrium partly filled by two large pods that float overhead like smooth white eggs, invisibly suspended from the ceiling. Inside the larger ‘egg’ is a 60-seat classroom; the smaller one contains a 24-station computer centre. The building was heavily sponsored by Leslie L Dan, chairman and founder of Novopharm, helped by Apotex, Shoppers Drug Mart, the province of Ontario and the University of Toronto.
Next on our trip was the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, designed by Stuttgart-based Stefan Behnisch of Behnisch Architekten – often said to be the most promising architect currently working with sustainable architecture – and local company Architects Alliance, which is also working on the new Four Seasons hotel being built by Menkes Developments in Toronto’s Yorkville area. The Research Centre is wedged between two vintage buildings. The architects have been able to insert a glass-and-steel ‘wedge’, connected to one of its flanking buildings by a glass-topped indoor winter garden, with a forest of living bamboo trees.
The amazing Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts must also be on any cultural tour. From outside, it is a somewhat masculine sculpture of dark grey Canadian bricks, with a three-floor, clear-glass frontage. Inside, its auditoria curve and blend like the inside of the computer-designed Boeing 777 (though this lovely building was of course designed by South Africanborn Jack Diamond of Diamond and Schmitt Architects.
The legendary founder and ongoing CEO of Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Isadore Sharp, and his wife, Rosalie Wise Sharp, have given magnificently, throughout the city. Another beneficiary of their generous support is the Sharp Centre for Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design, above the old brick building where she herself studied. Englishman Will Alsop of SMC Alsop was chosen here – and what a brave, and bold, decision that was. He won Britain’s top architecture prize for his Peckham Library in south London. Here he has thrown a separate black-studded white box (about the size of two enclosed tennis courts) above the old brick building. The ‘box’ is supported by giant knitting needles, red, orange and grey, sprouting from the ground far below. You get into the ‘box’ by a scarlet-enclosed staircase rising up out of the old brick building. The Sharps were helped in this particular fund-raising effort by another Toronto icon, George Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of luxury adventure travel firm Butterfield & Robinson. The lovely green area around the old building is now prominently labelled Butterfield Park.
Frank Gehry, who was born in Toronto, although he is now a longtime resident of Los Angeles, is constructing in town – supports that look like the skeleton of a fairground helter-skelter are in place for his extension of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Another big name already here is Raymond Moriyama of Moriyama & Teshima Architects, responsible for the Bata Shoe Museum.
Toronto is home to lots of art. The McMichael collection was started by Robert and Signe McMichael in 1955 and today it has more than 6,000 Canadian works. It is particularly known for its collection of works by the ‘Group of Seven’ artists at the beginning of the 20th century who wanted to create a distinctive visual language. There were in fact more than seven: in all, the members were Franklin Carmichael, AJ Casson, LL Fitzgerald, Lawren Harris, Edwin Holgate, AY Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, JEH MacDonald, Tom Thomson and Frederick Varley.
No one, of course, can forget the Crystal, the extension to the Bloor Street entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum that is named after its main donor, Chinese-Jamaican financier Michael Lee-Chin (a couple of the Weston family are also included in the full-size photo montage of donors inside the Crystal). Here Daniel Libeskind, who actually taught our friend Dana Kalczak when he was still a professor at the University of Toronto, has come up with the ultimate Christmas-tree bauble, magnified several thousand times. Outside, sharp glass angles protrude at varying degrees. Inside, there are spectacular galleries as well as ample space for the museum’s excellent boutique, restaurant and ‘contemplation rooms’.
MARY GOSTELOW is editor-in-chief of WOW.travel, the online magazine of www.kiwicollection.com
