How do you distill Toronto’s most exciting examples of contemporary architecture into concise, bite-size morsels? With great care and some difficulty say the authors of A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto (Douglas & McIntyre). Husband and wife team Margaret and Phil Goodfellow narrowed a list of about 250 contenders down to just 63 buildings or complexes, grouped by neighbourhood and stitched together into convenient walking tours. The book gets its official launch on Friday at the Royal Ontario Museum (4:30 – 9:30 pm) during the kick-off party for this weekend’s Doors Open Toronto (May 29 & 30).
The first challenge, says Phil, was to define the meaning of contemporary for the purposes of the book. “We worked our way backwards always asking the question, ‘Does the building still feel contemporary?’ and we ended up with what felt like the right starting points, the Bata Shoe Museum (completed in 1995, designed by Moriyama & Teshima Architects) and the Allen Lambert Galleria in Brookfield Place (completed in 1992, designed by Santiago Calatrava). One was an international architect building a public space (Calatrava) and the other was a private museum built through philanthropy; we saw those two projects as harbingers of things to come.”
So much has happened in Toronto architecture since that pivotal time in the early 1990s. Great international talents like Will Alsop, Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry have left their marks alongside significant works by local firms like KPMB, Teeple Architects, Hariri Pontarini and Diamond + Schmitt, among others.
“I think the architecture boom internationally has given architects, both here and abroad, a lot more to consider in terms of influences,” speculates Phil. “Toronto firms have started really honing their game and citing international examples, not just referencing things that exist here in the city.”
Left to his devices, the more loquacious Phil would have produced a much denser tome “but Maggie’s an economist,” he says, “she would go through and just slash and burn.”
“We didn’t write it for architects,” stresses Margaret, “we wrote it for everyone else. We didn’t want it to be jargony or condescending; we wanted to provide some perspective on buildings we especially like along with some interesting factoids, things people probably wouldn’t know.”
Excellent photographs accompany each entry and there’s a neighourhood overview at the beginning of each tour to set the stage and provide some history and context.
“We tried to bring the cultural renaissance buildings into a conversation with some other, possibly lesser-known projects, like the Thomas L. Wells Public School,” says Phil, “which is out in the north eastern corner of Scarborough but it’s a wonderful place and we hope that readers will discover some new buildings they didn’t know about.”
“We feel like this is a time capsule,” he concludes, “because things have changed so much even since the most recent inclusion, the Royal Conservatory and Koerner Hall have opened. The conversation has changed, it’s not about cultural projects anymore, now we’re talking about growth of the city, public transit, the urban realm and how we furnish it. So that might be the next conversation.”
WHERE/WHEN: Doors Open Toronto, May 29 & 30; 147 buildings across the city welcome the public with free tours; see website for details.
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