cambrai avenue and vimy circle

[sodapop]

heres some renders/drawings i found of vimy circle and cambrai avenue
vimy circle

another of vimy circle

cambrai avenue

cambrai avenue and vimy circle were planned roads back in the 30's(?) i was reading about them in unbuilt toronto. they would have been awesome! i think the td centre would be split in 2 and there would be no td tower, would fcp have been built??? cambrai avenue was similar to federal avenue which was planned in the same location but consisted of federal government buildings. would cambrai have been worth not having the td tower and fcp? (i think the royal bank plaza might have been able to be built...)

 

[Tewder]

Well, it may not really have been an either/or situation. It may just mean that the TD Centre would have been built somewhere else?

I think it's a shame this scheme was never realized. It would have been an element of grandeur in Toronto that we just don't see much of elsewhere (University Avenue, perhaps?).

 

[whatever]

With enough will a Vimy Circle type thing could still be realized at College/University. The chance will be gone once MaRS starts up again, but if the city (or, more likely, the province) were to step in and negotiate for the purchase of the grounds in front of the OPG building and MaRS were redesigned to pull the building back from the corner and follow the curves of the other tower you could absolutely pull off something very similar.

 

[Chuck]

With enough will a Vimy Circle type thing could still be realized at College/University. The chance will be gone once MaRS starts up again, but if the city (or, more likely, the province) were to step in and negotiate for the purchase of the grounds in front of the OPG building and MaRS were redesigned to pull the building back from the corner and follow the curves of the other tower you could absolutely pull off something very similar.

I like that idea so much I sketched it up in paint. The problem is that this area is a little too far from the 'heart' of the city to be as heavily used as say Columbus Circle in NY. A few new projects could change that though. Also not sure of the impact on traffic, or how this thing would be signalized.

 

[Tewder]

The Vimy plan is more than just a traffic circle though. The formally designed buildings surrounding it are part of the whole effect. In this sense I really can't think of a similar example in Toronto.

 

[FAC33]

I love that render of what Vimy Circle would look like today.

The original concept drawings are beautiful in their own right, not least of all for that beautiful lettering.

 

[Mongo]

Except how much of today's skyline would have been built? I am sure that a lot of people would have objected to, for example, the CN Tower "spoiling the view corridor".

 

[adma]

cambrai avenue and vimy circle were planned roads back in the 30's(?) i was reading about them in unbuilt toronto. they would have been awesome! i think the td centre would be split in 2 and there would be no td tower, would fcp have been built??? cambrai avenue was similar to federal avenue which was planned in the same location but consisted of federal government buildings. would cambrai have been worth not having the td tower and fcp? (i think the royal bank plaza might have been able to be built...)

Actually, the first critical element built "in the way of" Cambrai was the late 50s Royal York Hotel addition.

 

[junctionist]

Except how much of today's skyline would have been built? I am sure that a lot of people would have objected to, for example, the CN Tower "spoiling the view corridor".

The skyline would probably look similar. The CN Tower is slender, and there would be room to manoeuvre in terms of its placement on the railway lands. Its present location doesn't align with University Avenue, so it wouldn't ruin an axial view corridor. It could be placed to fit in between some of those classical skyscrapers in the Vimy Circle perspective. With sensitivity, a cityscape can accommodate a lot of eras of projects and look beautiful; city-building doesn't have to be some battle for supremacy of view corridors versus skyscrapers, and heritage preservation or contemporary development. It takes a sophisticated culture of planning and building to realize this.

Few other buildings of the present skyline would interfere with an axial view corridor on Cambrai Avenue. One exception would be Citibank Place, whose absence wouldn't be missed at all. It's possible that the skyline might have been more interestingly arranged if planners had more of a vision for shaping it guided by heritage rather than assuming a blank slate and filling it with rectangular towers--which is essentially the case when any heritage was deemed unimportant, even the monumental work at King and Bay of one of the best architectural firms in the world at one point, Carrere and Hastings.

This discussion supposes that the buildings in the drawings would have actually been built around the circle and that they wouldn't have been demolished in the 1950s-1960s.