Stitching patches on a downtown quilt
Developer Peter Freed and architect Charles Gane craft their next addition to the King Street West area — Fashion House
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
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May 23, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT
In just four years, Charles Gane, principal at core architects inc., has upped the look and urban sense of the old downtown district around Toronto's Victoria Memorial Square from dowdy to smart.
The condominium projects Mr. Gane has designed in the area for developer Peter Freed are not instances of artistic radicalism. Rather, they offer things this forlorn zone needed (and still needs) more urgently than avant-garde esprit: sturdy and modern architectural bones, mid-sized and mid-priced places for people to live, and injections of sleek, urbane styling.
"These are urban fabric buildings," Mr. Gane told me in a conversation last week in Mr. Freed's vast condominium atop 66 Portland St., just off Victoria Square. "We need them to build the city. But we're slowly building a modernist aesthetic that didn't exist in this neighbourhood.
"Look at the seven buildings we've done. Granted, they are not like some crazy L Tower"— a reference to a proposed condominium development in Toronto by celebrity avant-garde architect Daniel Libeskind. "But I don't learn from an L Tower, and it doesn't help me understand the city.
"If Toronto were full of these iconic buildings, it wouldn't be much of a city. What we're doing makes sense on King West. We try to be as innovative as we can, but I kind of like square edges, rectangular buildings. They fit in quite nicely."
Fashion House, Mr. Gane's latest and largest work for Mr. Freed, carries forward this progressive agenda (with an interesting twist), this time on a 1-1/4-acre parcel fronting a strip of King Street West that's become known as the fashion district.
Scheduled to go to market next month, the large residential and commercial complex will carry the architect's usual argument for modernity, but alongside a ghost from Toronto's industrial past.
First, the past. Mr. Gane will restore to life a mid-Victorian manufacturing plant on the site by turning its upper factory floors into brick-and-beam offices and its street level into a space suitable for a restaurant. (In total, Fashion House will include 20,000 square feet of retail space.)
While I am not a fan of Toronto's official determination to preserve every brick and splinter from our 19th-century fabric, this act of architectural salvation makes sense. The old building will provide a pleasant commercial alternative to the dull office blocks round about, and will likely attract fashion businesses clustered in the neighbourhood.
The larger part of Fashion House, Mr. Gane's original handiwork, will wrap around the factory, rising to 14 storeys at the rear of the site and pushing out to the street just east of the Victorian building.
The composition of this King Street facade is massive and very bold. A five-storey curtain wall of glass hits the sidewalk hard. Above the lower glistening slab, there is a one-storey horizontal notch. Over this reveal ascends another block of glass, three storeys thick and arrayed parallel to the street. At the tenth storey, the powerful compression of the design is suddenly released, and an elevated garden, with large trees and a swimming pool, opens to the sky. The backdrop of this park, in turn, is formed by yet another slab that carries the muscular structure up to its full 14 storeys.
If its design is not middling at all, Fashion House is mid-range in other respects, especially size and price. The 360 residential units (some available as work lofts for companies that wish to own their units) will go on the market between the low $200,000s and $1.5-million, with most prices falling between $275,000 and $350,000.
The stacks of large glass boxes at the bottom of Fashion House would surely seem blank, even menacing and oppressive, were it not for Mr. Gane's most exciting design move anywhere in this project. It involves hanging, at each of the lower levels, floor-to-ceiling curtains in bright, strong magenta, warm orange and other colours in the spectrum vicinity of pure red. In the finished building, the appearance will be a delight, and will provide a snappy, up-tempo contrast to the brown and grey textures of the neighbourhood.
"The fashion element is a new thing for us," Mr. Gane said. "The building is trying to make a real statement. It's trying to represent, in a real way, what's going on in the neighbourhood. We brought that in with the coloured curtains, which we've never done. There are still not enough buildings that are making an aesthetic statement. I think we're heading a great direction."
