First news article about Market Wharf ?
Moving beyond the cereal box
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
May 30, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
And now, for his next trick, Toronto architect Peter Clewes will make a new condominium stack in the city's St. Lawrence neighbourhood materialize out of thin air, then instantly sell out to savvy buyers in the audience. Presto!
This scenario is not as wacky as it sounds. Throughout Toronto's current condo boom, developers have been putting up, at a bewildering clip, tall and very popular buildings designed by Mr. Clewes. As for the prolific architect himself, he seems to pull new mid-priced condo schemes out of his hat, like a magician producing live bunnies from nowhere, with remarkable ease and speed and to widespread critical applause. The results, so far, have been pleasing, svelte boxes with gleaming faces of glass, and with much evidence of the architect's modernist affection for right-angle corners and flat-topped, broad-shouldered profiles.
In the Context Developments project proposed to rise in the St. Lawrence Market area, the podium, which contains the parking, and the high-rise block of this composition, named Market Wharf, are straight-up boxes, to be sure. The layouts of the apartments inside are also entirely conventional.
But in this building, immediately south of St. Lawrence Market on Lower Jarvis Street, Mr. Clewes has made his most interesting deviations to date from the strict modern aesthetics of exterior effect, and perhaps his most striking artistic contribution to our skyline.
All is not perfect, however, with Mr. Clewes's handiwork. The hard street-wall of the podium is made mostly of two-storey glass sheets, behind which will spread the harshly lit aisles of a mammoth Shoppers Drug Mart. While I can't imagine that residents will like having a super-sized store at the foot of their building, or that pedestrians will be fond of that cascade of glazed curtain wall, putting an 18,000-square-foot retail establishment at grade makes a certain rough sense: The famous old market next door has long made this spot a place of trade, so adding a drugstore to the mix doesn't strike me as particularly odd.
Be that as it may, the best architectural feature of the brick-faced podium is its window system, if anything so lively and eccentric can be called a system at all. Rectangular openings of different sizes skip and dance across the façade, creating a kind of abstract surface with cinematic swing and syncopation. The podium treatment is one of Mr. Clewes's departures from his usual dressy modernism.
The slab is another. While it's hardly strange to see a piece of cereal-box residential architecture in Toronto, you'd have to look far and wide to find one this romantic. The balcony guards that extend in long horizontal sweeps across the west and east facades of the building undulate gently, sensuously. Once this structure is up, these waving bands, executed in fritted glass, could resemble silky ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Tinted by the light of dusk, the slab's western surface could look like an animated screen of glowing colour. In any case, such dramatic optical effects in a tall building, rare downtown, are good things this condominium block will likely produce.
I love the name of this project. It dispenses with the blah placelessness of so many condo-tower titles and succinctly invokes the history of its site. In Toronto's first half-century, before the Lake Ontario shoreline was pushed south by landfill and the eastern city was cut off from the water by the railway corridor, on this place stood one of the principal wharves that brought the world's goods to Toronto. Market Wharf is a welcome reminder of the city's past glory as a premier Great Lakes port.
