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.
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