The only trouble with being featured on the Doors Open Toronto itinerary is that you’re pretty much stuck at your own site for the weekend and can’t get out to tour the other awesome locations opening their doors to eager architecture fans.
With this in mind, Evergreen Brick Works kindly invited 2010 DOT participants to preview its sprawling construction site last Thursday. Although the Bayview behemoth won’t be officially open until September, the 40-acre site will be one of the draws on this year’s Doors Open Toronto program May 29 – 30.
Lead architect Joe Lobko (du Toit Allsopp Hillier), above, guided a large group over, under and through the labyrinth of what was once one of North America’s largest brick-making operations. Started in the 1880s, “the Don Valley Brick Works is the reason Toronto is a city built of brick, as opposed to wood like Vancouver, for instance,” noted Lobko.
The architect was clearly enjoying his role as tour guide; the 45-minute show-and-tell stretched to an hour and my sense was that Lobko would have happily talked all evening. The Brick Works will ultimately become a centre for sustainability, a gateway to Toronto’s incredible ravine system and a showcase for Evergreen’s transformative, eco-friendly urban agenda.
Prior to the tour, Evergreen Executive Director Geoff Cape expressed his vision for making the place into “a showcase for best practices related to sustainable building and planning. And now, international interest is unfolding without very much work on our part; I was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last January and to my great surprise, the project was given an award by National Geographic in Washington. I’d like to think that this project will provoke fresh thinking about city design.”
With 14 buildings, both new and heritage, the Brick Works is a tremendously ambitious construction project, which is one of the reasons Evergreen has opted to consult with a variety of architects and landscape architects rather than concentrate on a single firm’s vision for the place. Lobko is “quarterbacking” an extensive team of creative contributors including his own firm, DTAH, Diamond + Schmitt Architects, ERA Architects, Stantec, Claude Cormier, and a host of consulting engineers. Interestingly, nearly all of the design firms are based right here in Toronto.
“We’re not Toronto-centric,” stresses Lobko. “Whenever we think about putting a team together we think about the right team; I’m working on the Gardiner competition at the moment with a firm from Rotterdam and a firm from England, so it really just depends on the needs and circumstances of the project.”
“We have consciously sought out a diversity of perspectives,” he adds. “We collectively worked on the entire plan — our firm drove it but we collectively contributed to it. Then we figured out through the evolution of that plan that Diamond + Schmitt would do that building there and ERA would do this building here and Claude would work on this space and Hillier over there on that space. Some people’s hands are everywhere.”
“There’s a lot of ambition behind the project — a lot of Evergreen ambition, a lot of community ambition, a lot of government ambition — but only so many resources. One of the biggest challenges is reconciling all of that ambition with the resources available and making sure that we have the right priorities. The grand vision is in place and will unfold over a number of years, we’re focused on delivering the base that will allow the facility to grow but we’ll always wish that we’d had the resources to do more.”
See for yourself how the Brick Works is evolving May 29 and 30; the site’s weekly farmer’s market opens that same weekend and runs Saturday’s thru October (shuttle buses run from Broadview subway station, consult the Brick Works website for details).
Photos by Christopher Jones
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