Two weeks ago I took my son to Canada’s Sugar Beach. He’s a toddler, and I wasn’t sure whether he’d enjoy the visit. The newest park on the waterfront is a playful two acres of landscape design by Claude Cormier, with candy-striped hunks of granite and small, sugar-pile hills of grass – but that conceptual play is a bit over the head of a 19-month-old. I liked it a lot, and surprisingly, so did he: those rocks and hills are great to climb and tumble on, and the large artificial beach, with its wispy white sand imported from Ohio, is one serious sandbox. Throw in the sights of the lake (boat! seagull!) and you have a winning park experience for almost anybody.

The sad thing was, we had the place to ourselves. It was about eight on a Saturday morning – an hour when the only people using parks are parents, dog owners, and elders practicing tai chi – and there was almost nobody else there. The adjacent Redpath Sugar plant and the new Corus Quay office building (handsome but underwhelming) were quiet.

Sugar Beach’s time hasn’t come yet, I thought. The park is still half-enclosed in chain link fence. There are construction trailers nearby. But eventually it’s going to anchor a new district – Waterfront Toronto has just released plans for the East Bayfront neighbourhood which will end a block away, so give it a few years.

Then I went back this past weekend with my son and my wife. And this time other people had the same idea. The park was crawling with children; at least five families had trekked there with toys, picnic blankets and bathing suits. The park’s new water feature was open: a series of fountains set into a granite maple leaf, spraying unpredictable geysers of water. My son joined a crowd of kids dancing and dodging for hours. Meanwhile I got to examine the details more closely: the high pink steel umbrellas, paving with its edges crumbled like a sugar cube, the artfully scattered maple trees, the red and white candy stripes across the granite outcropping. Then we had a nice picnic and shared sand toys with the family in the next set of Muskoka chairs.

This tells me a few things. One, Torontonians are eager to get a new perspective on the lakefront. It’s not only design obsessives like me who are interested in seeing a new park in a desolate stretch of downtown. It’s a tough walk to get there, even from the nearby St. Lawrence neighbourhood, but that didn’t stop us all from showing up.

Two: good parks are kid-friendly. As any parent learns, having a child takes you out constantly into public space, especially parks, and kids can play almost anywhere, but some places work better. Cormier’s design in this case (with The Planning Partnership) provides enough variety of topography and texture to serve adults’ and kids’ sensibilities. To me it feels a bit spare for the context, but once many new buildings go up and the streets become more crowded, it should be a perfect fit. (Part of what’s now the park – the biggest hills to the north – is actually a future development site.)

Three, parks that have an artificial character are winning over the city. Until recently our most popular park destinations have been quasi-wild places – High Park, where the landscape design follows the English naturalist tradition. But that may well change. Sugar Beach uses some of the same design language as HtO Park on the western waterfront – where Cormier was one of the design firms – and in the past couple of years HtO has become wildly popular.

This means Toronto, thanks to the waterfront agency and the city, is keeping up with both cultural changes and the latest currents in park design. Today most urban parks, including Sugar Beach, are on former industrial sites; the most interesting landscape designs capture and work with that gritty, un-natural heritage. The poster child for these ideas is the High Line in New York, which is an artful update of an overgrown, abandoned rail line. (Here’s a piece I wrote for The Globe and Mail about the park and these ideas.) Some of the world’s best designers are now working in Toronto, including James Corner Field Operations and Michael van Valkenburgh Associates, and when they’re done the results should make everybody happy. Even antsy toddlers.

Welcome, Spacing readers. This is my blog about architecture in Toronto and beyond. Please take a look around; click here for a post on the best new buildings in Toronto this year; or click here for details about me.

This is a building that works.

Yes, it looks sexy and impractical: a cascading Jenga stack of glass, cement board and steel, punctured by bright shots of colour, hanging gardens and an atrium, heavy blocks of apartments hanging in the air.

But this new co-op residence by Teeple Architects has substance, too. It has the gutsy but practical spirit of Toronto’s best architecture: It’s green, hardy, and very inexpensive, and provides 85 large and comfortable apartments for Toronto Community Housing tenants.

The concept is almost as elegant as the building’s form. Toronto Community Housing has had to find room for people displaced by the redevelopment of Regent Park, and it’s developed a few well-designed buildings on the east side of downtown; for this one, they joined forces with a local of the hospitality workers’ union UNITE HERE. The building is filling up now with local UNITE HERE members; many are former Regent Park residents and most can walk to work at downtown hotels and restaurants. As of this fall, the main floor retail space is going to house a restaurant and teaching kitchen, staffed by residents, and drawing produce from the terrace gardens and “hanging gardens” in the atrium.

Those outdoor spaces help make the building look so unusual.

From the street, it’s got a fairly solid face, which helps restore the edges of a block that was decimated years ago.  “Our intent was to have the building contribute to the city beyond itself,” says Stephen Teeple of Teeple Architects. “It lines up with the street and defines the corner.”  That is conservative urban design. But, Teeple says, “Our point as architects was to show that you don’t have to be a banal building to do that.”

Which is where the gardens come in. instead of gathering the building’s open space around its edges and creating gardens on the ground, “We carved the gardens into the building; it’s a Moebius pattern that connects the courtyards.”

One courtyard on the second floor sits next to the building’s meeting rooms. From there, the atrium cascades up to the top of the 11-story tower – lined with trellises that will eventually be filled with climbing vines.

Halfway up there’s a bridge across the abyss; there, on the sixth floor, are two courtyards, also with gardens, and incredible views to the growing skyline of St. Lawrence Market area and the heart of downtown.

But within the building, that odd, towering shaft creates surprisingly bright and pleasant spaces: even the hallways have windows and views.  “You get natural light and natural ventilation through all corridors,” Teeple says, “and it creates a sense of connectivity between neighbours.” As the residents look out on the terraces and hang out there – which is happening already – “you get a sense of community that you would never get otherwise, in a slab building,” Teeple says.

I believe it. Though it’s early to tell for sure – the building is new, and the official planting hasn’t been finished yet – somebody’s already filled in the planters with flowers and herbs.

As for the apartments themselves, they’re big and bright, but not too bright. Going against the fashion in commercial condos for all-glass facades – which always look much worse in real life, with curtains and TV units, than they do in the glossy promotional images – 60 Richmond has walls that are 60% solid, only 40% glass. “That’s all you need,” Teeple says. “You get big expanses of glass in the living rooms, and reasonable windows in the bedrooms.”

The limited windows also make the building more energy-efficient. Combined with some other features – like an unusual ventilation system that transfers air from the hot to the cool side of the building, and a green roof across the top of the building – they should add up to a Gold rating under the LEED sustainability rating system. That costs money, and yet Teeple and TCHC built this highly unusual building for a bargain-basement price. ($185 per square foot, lower than the average for ordinary, boxy midrise condos.)

How is that possible? “TCHC has a strong interest in getting good design, and the other focus they have is sustainability,” Teeple says. “Some private developers have an interest in [sustainability], but they can’t afford to really pursue it.” TCHC, because they’re a property owner, they directly benefit from energy savings.” In other words, they’ve stretched their budget to account for long-term operating costs and the savings that come with greener building.

Also, there’s nothing fancy in the building’s materials: no expensive wood veneers or carpeting in the halls, just bare, handsome concrete (and rough wood around the elevators in the main lobby).  But the tenants get real hardwood floors which can be resanded and should last decades.

At a glance, the blocky, fanciful, seemingly precarious form of 60 Richmond looks like it came from contemporary Dutch designers – like MVRDV – who specialize in using “rational” criteria to create buildings in wild configurations. But at 60 Richmond, truly almost nothing is there without a practical purpose. Teeple – whose firm has established itself as one of the best in the city and the country – shares the commitment of other top Toronto designers to create buildings that function well, that relate to what’s around them and that will stand up over time.

And if they look incredible, too, then that’s cool.

“When you’re designing an urban building, it can be sculpturally interesting, but you don’t have to dismantle the city to do that,” Teeple says. And you don’t have to spend much money, either. Private developers: Take notes.

Teeple Architects project team led by Stephen Teeple, Chris Radigan, Richard Lai, William Elsworthy.

Photos by Shai Gil.

Head into the office tower at Bloor and Bay, wind your way past Gap Kids and down into the concourse, open a heavy door labelled WORKShop and you will see this: a plywood desk by Frank Gehry. A 1960s fireman’s helmet from Hong Kong. An art installation that arranges cheap melamine bowls into a symbolic emperor’s gate. And, all around you, an installation of colourful glass vials dispensing luscious odours of pine.

This - the vials, not the other stuff – is Scentscapes, a new show at the one-of-a-kind gallery Workshop. ”Scent Squadron,” an installation by Toronto architects Khoury Levit Fong, plays with the ideas of the traditional Chinese garden. It builds on a design for a public garden now being constructed in Xi’an, China (by a team led by Rodolphe El-Khoury). Both are intriguing projects: they appeal to the fifth of our five senses, using smell in a deliberate and cleverly abstract way.

And this work wouldn’t be shown anywhere else in  Toronto, other than perhaps the Architecture Gallery at Harbourfront. Few galleries make room for architecture, especially contemporary work, and that’s too bad; this sort of space helps start discussion about where the field is going, without any of the catcalls you get with a bold new building in construction.

Workshop provides a rough-and-ready venue for such discussion, thanks to Workshop head Larry Richards. His vision defines the place, and his sensibility is what brings in the Gehry desk (a relic rescued from the local offices of ad agency Chiat/Day), and the assorted pieces of Canadian and Chinese furniture around the edges of the room (see below).

In Toronto’s design world,  Richards is a real character. He’s been influential: as the dean at U of T’s School of Architecture, he attracted top designers to teach and build on campus, including Morphosis, Behnisch, Frank Gehry, Stephen Teeple, Kohn Shnier and Diamond Schmitt.

But more than that, he’s a fascinating figure. A courtly, softspoken fellow who’s taught at (and run) three schools of architecture; an activist for great design; sometime advisor to the rich and powerful; a connoisseur of high design with a sense of humour. At Workshop, where he’s found a canvas to express himself as a curator and designer. The gallery shows off objects, architecture and concepts at the intersection of Chinese and Western culture. Backing it is Hong Kong developer and fashion mogul Kin Yeung. Yeung’s fashion label, Blanc de Chine, has a similarly cross-cultural bent.

Yeung’s family also owns the tower, 80 Bloor West, which is why Workshop wound up in its odd location. You may have seen its display windows as you leave Bay subway station: It’s an old retail space, right next to the station’s most circuitous, least busy exit. That is an apt setting for Workshop, which as the name suggests is part business and part creative atelier. While they sell furniture and artwork, Yeung and Richards are also interested in spurring discussion.  They’ve sponsored competitions (for a shoe storage tower) and a furniture installation by a student designer, James Lennox.

The first Workshop show, Ming Modern, included furniture inspired by Ming-period craftsmanship. And it also included wildly imaginative proposals from a graduate architecture class in which Richards had his students imagine how to renovate the tower in keeping with Daoist principles. (The tower was designed by Peter Carter, once part of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago office, and it is itself a quirky remnant of halfway-Miesian Toronto late modernism).

Richards has plans to expand the gallery into a vacant space across the hall – which is massive and currently a trove of fascinating junk.  Until then, take a few minutes to browse this modest space and check out the explorations and collections of a genuinely creative mind.

The Globe and Mail has the news that the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture is considering a new plan to revitalize its facilities – by moving into a new “visual arts, architecture and urbanism complex” in One Spadina Crescent.

The faculty held a competition, won by Office dA with Adamson Associates, to revamp its current facilities. As I wrote a little while back, it won a Progressive Architecture award, but seemed to me like a heavy-handed approach to a building that has lots of soul.

Now that proposal seems likely to die.The new idea(news of which has been circulating for a while) would give a new purpose to One Spadina, an ornate pile that since 1875 has been a seminary, a military hospital (where Amelia Earhart worked as a nurse) and home to the university-owned Connaught Medical Research Labs (the developers of insulin).

It’s now a mishmash of university offices, including a donation bank for eyes. Yes, eyes. I spent many hours there as a student working on the newspaper; sometimes I’d open the front doors for a cabbie delivering a small cooler.

I can attest that the place was, and still is, in Gothic disrepair (despite a partial reno). Adding to the dark atmosphere, a professor was murdered there in 2001, and last year an urban explorer fell to her death.

More importantly, it’s the visual end point for a grand avenue. If you look up Spadina Avenue from downtown, you see this building perched in the middle of a roundabout (Google map). The back end has a series of unimpressive additions and a large parking lot/utility yard. It’s crying out for an expansion, and given the views it would be ideal for a grand, iconic architectural statement. That seems to be what Dean Richard Sommer and the faculty are pushing for – and good for them.

On a recent trip to Ottawa, I had a chance to visit the Canadian Museum of Nature. This natural history museum just completed an epic $230-million renovation led by KPMB – and along with much unsexy restoration and repair to the structure’s guts, and a new facilities and event space, it fused a glassy new form onto the vaguely Gothic museum. The two parts make a handsome couple.

The Victoria Memorial Museum Building went up between 1905 and 1911 – the first purpose-built museum in Canada. But It wasn’t built well, and in 1914 most of the front tower was demolished, leaving a two-story stub. The structure has kept sinking since then, and it needed a total overhaul. The work began in 2004, and it brought in a completely new steel structure; all new mechanical systems; seismic protection; asbestos removal, waterproofing…

This is just the sort of laundry list that tends to wear out designers and clients, and drag any aesthetic quality out of a building project. Not so here. As you can see, the designers (a joint venture led by KPMB) added a dramatic new element to the building: a glass-enclosed grand stair that rises above the entrance. They’ve tagged it “the lantern,” and from the outside it makes a grand statement, especially given the context in a homely residential neighbourhood. (From inside you can see straight to Parliament Hill, though. Ottawa is a small city.)

Inside, the lantern structure adds a bit of extra floor space and a route between the four levels of the museum. The stair is beautifully detailed in Carrera marble and steel, and harmonizes well with the  very handsome glass facades. (Four large columns carry all the weight.)

It interacts with the building’s original atrium by David Ewart, which is quite minimal, with a bit of Beaux-Arts botanical and animal details.

A few newly designed spaces, including a meeting hall and gorgeous new cafe, employ pale-stained white oak furniture and millwork; the cafe has some graphic wall prints. But generally the materials and the moves complement the original building. There is nothing superfluous here and all of the visible design work is contemporary in its forms and materials without being visually overbearing. It makes the old building look better. That’s more than I can say for the Royal Ontario Museum, a museum of the same vintage, and Daniel Libeskind’s showy yet unattractive and awkward Michael Lee-Chin Crystal.

If anything, the new CMN design is too modest; I’m not sure that the original building, aside from the stonework on the exterior, warrants such deference. But this is Ottawa, and the client is ultimately the government of Canada – not the boldest of design patrons. And to be fair, this building has an important place in Ottawa’s short history. It housed Canada’s legislature for four years after the Parliament Buildings burned down in 1916; it also hosted the National Gallery of Canada between 1911 and 1960.

Credit goes to PKG Joint Venture Architects – KPMB, led by Bruce Kuwabara and project architect Brent Wagler; heritage specialists Barry Padolsky Associates; and Gagnon, Letellier, Cyr.

All photos are by Tom Arban.

If you want it done right, do it yourself. The gutsy young architects who run Studio Junction, Peter Tan and Christine Ho Ping Kong, would be too modest to put it that way – but they’ve accomplished some extraordinary work by building their own designs, with Tan sawing, milling and finishing the fine-grained details.

Case in point: Mjolk, a design shop in Toronto’s Junction area.

The interior design had much to live up to: the store’s proprietors Juli Daoust and John Baker sell only the finest Japanese and Scandinavian design, from Aalto to Fukasawa. And they are obsessive and very knowledgeable design bloggers. SJ responded with display shelves and interior elements that show impressive craftsmanship and creative, unexpected uses of wood.

(That’s also what SJ delivered in their home-slash-studio, which I wrote about for Dwell last year.)

And at Mjolk, Tan led the building team, taking the space from a wide-open art gallery to its current state in just six weeks. Tan “was here all the time during construction, doing the really filthy work,” says Baker. “They treated this place like it was their second home.”

From the front of the space, you can see the major architectural moves: a drop ceiling and floor made of white-stained Douglas fir plywood. To the right is a C-shaped showcase, made of computer-milled plywood and topped with a teak veneer. It’s one of two long displays that help invite shoppers into the store. “In retail, you always want to get people into the middle and the back of the space,” says Ho Ping Kong. “It draws you into the space, but also it has a lightness to it. And because it’s clad in teak, it’s a nod to all the classic Danish design in the store.”

On the opposite wall there’s an innovative kitchen unit made of oiled teak and black powder-coated steel. The slits cut into the teak let dishes stand up to dry – or, in this context, to be seen by browsers.

The counter stretches out into a cantilevered display shelf.

The most spectacular moment is the desk: a chunky counter in Douglas fir (see image at top of post), placed in front of a curvy feature wall. The desk surface echoes the fir on the floors, but this is left raw, so it has a tactile beauty that really sinks in when you sit down on an Aalto stool to complete your purchase. As for the wall, “It’s clad in offcuts” – leftover scraps – “from our workshop and the workshops of our friends,” Tan says. The range of different wood species and stains harmonizes with other materials nearby.“If you introduce a new wood, it fits in,” Tan explains. Everything doesn’t have to match.

The wall (left) was actually created for an exhibition at the design show Come Up To My Room, and altered to fit in the Mjolk space. That allowed the designers to finish the construction in six weeks leading up to last Christmas opening. Other than the screen, “The rest of it, we essentially designed on the fly,” says Ho Ping Kong. “And I think working in that way, with very limited time and not too big a budget, stimulates creativity.”

The last thing to be completed was a glass-and-wood wall at the back of the store, which divides the floor from a back room. It’s a clearly Japanese touch. “The back wall does have the suggestion of a shoji screen,” Tan admits. And in its modernist yet timeless simplicity, it’s a match for a pale, perfectly hewn Fukasawa cabinet nearby, another piece of modern design influenced by ancient craft traditions.

And that’s the essence of this project. Tan says the closest connection between the store and its stock, between Studio Junction and Hans Wegner, has to do with care and quality. “Really, what we borrowed from them was the emphasis on quality of building,” he says. In other words, there is beauty in doing things right.

I’m off blog duty this week and out of town this weekend. Let me leave you with a recent article I wrote for Designlines Magazine: a visit to the Riverdale House, by the talented interior designer Mazen El-Abdallah.

Next week, I’ll tour a new shop whose interior is inspired by the best of Scandinavian Modern and Japanese design – and does something creative with those two legacies.

That Designlines piece is here.

As I wrote last month, this is the best of the shortlisted designs and a brilliant solution to a difficult puzzle. The 118,000-square-foot building will combine an open market space with a secure courthouse and office space – while maintaining an ensemble of 19th-century public buildings that were Toronto’s first civic centre. (A Google map is here.)

The new building will maintain friendly relations with the market’s main building across the street to the south and a Georgian former town hall to the north. The key is an atrium (above) that cuts the building into two bright wings, framing the cupola of the Georgian St. Lawrence Hall.

To the west (see above), facing the pedestrian Market Lane, the facade is visually broken up into a series of separate bays, each housing courtrooms. The thoughtfully detailed facade, with wood unshades and handsome exposed steel structure, should help maintain an urban scale in what is a very large building.

South view from the green roof

It’s only the first stage in a larger renovation of City Hall and Nathan Philips Square (see here for my take and background information). But already, the designers have created one of the city’s most remarkable public spaces: 35,000 square feet of garden, planted within the concrete, sandstone and glass of downtown.

To be precise, the designers - including PLANT Architect, Shore Tilbe Irwin, and Adrian Blackwell – didn’t create the space; they’ve reactivated this area on top of City Hall’s podium, which was an integral part of the 1958 design by Viljo Revell but has been empty and dormant for 20 years. (For history, see my last post on this or the city’s page here).

It’s a revelation. The space itself is already gorgeous, with arresting, colourful plantings by PLANT and beautiful furniture designed by Blackwell out of ipe and black steel. It has the magic-green-carpet quality of many green roofs, on a massive scale. Once the plantings fill in, it’ll make an excellent aesthetic argument, as well as an environmental one, for more green roofs. This is exactly what the city is hoping for.

But the design also illuminates the architecture of City Hall and Nathan Philips Square. The council chamber (see first pic below) is wrapped inside a mushroom-shaped volume of concrete. There is a complex series of connections between this central volume and the surrounding towers, but they’ve been closed or hard to navigate.

City Hall interior, Flickr photo by Darajan

Now, with the podium open, there are clear connections between the towers, and people can spill out from within City Hall. That includes the marriage office nearby. When I was there for the official opening Saturday, Mayor David Miller told a story about the night before: a just-married couple had wandered out onto the roof, which was open for an event with 1,000 mayors in town for a conference. They got a surprise ovation. Funny, but the same thing happened just after Miller spoke: a happy couple in white dress and black tie came out into the crowd and stood there, a bit dazed, as visitors with long-lens cameras and high-school kids on stilts streamed past them. It felt like something great was getting started, and not just for those two newlyweds.

Opening ceremony; Flickr photo by PJMixer

View of the council chamber from the southwest

Eastern edge of the roof, looking north

Behind the towers, looking west

..and a full aerial view

EDIT June 4: New image at top of post.

Today (May 28) will mark the groundbreaking on two buildings of exceptional importance for the city: a religious and community centre for Ismaili Muslims and a new museum of Islamic art. They’re being driven by the Aga Khan, the Ismaili spiritual leader and one of the world’s great architecture patrons (this book gives background). He’s in town today for the ceremony.

You may not have heard much about it before today, because the Aga Khan’s agencies are volunteer-driven and seemingly too modest to do much PR. Too bad, because this project is something special: essentially, a religious community is giving Toronto a major art museum and a new park, all designed to very high standards. (Globe news story; Lisa Rochon; Star news story.)

The centre and museum are large – about 100,000 square feet each – and the designs show creative, contemporary architecture that’s inflected with Islamic symbolism.

The project also features remarkably sensitive planning and landscaping, far better than anything nearby. Here is an overview:

The Ismaili Centre – there are five others in the world, including one in Burnaby, B.C. – is being designed by the Indian architect Charles Correa. It’s  meant to serve Ismaili communities in eastern Canada and northeastern U.S. It will include a jamaatkhana, or prayer hall, topped with a grand, two-layered glass dome. In renderings I saw a while back, it looked spectacular. Here is the centre:

The adjoining museum by  Japanese Pritzker Prize winner Fumihiko Maki is a bigger prize for Toronto. Maki also designed a building that represents Ismaili institutions in Ottawa, with Moriyama and Teshima, who are also working on the Toronto project.

Here is the museum:

It will be run by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which decided to place it here when another site in central London (!) fell through. Maki’s design includes another dome, a central courtyard, and limestone-clad walls that cantilever outward on all four sides. The museum will have permanent exhibits of Islamic art and artifacts from the Aga Khan’s collection, plus galleries for visiting exhibitions and an auditorium.

Why is the centre going here, specifically? Many Canadian Ismailis have roots in the nearby Thorncliffe Park area, and it’s convenient for travellers, right next to the Don Valley Parkway. An article in an official Ismaili publication spells out the reasoning. More generally, Canada is important to Ismailis: the community here is large and well-established, and the Aga Khan sees Canadian pluralism as a model for other societies.

Still, this is an odd site for a museum, right on a highway, and it’s big, at 17 acres. So the Aga Khan’s agencies deserve much credit for how well they’re treating it. Under a plan by Sasaki Associates, it’ll essentially be a park – two formal gardens and an array of walking trails and botanical gardens, all publicly accessible. The parking is all buried underground, which is miraculous on a suburban site like this.

For the central garden, the Lebanese landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic is working with the idea of the chahar bagh or four-part garden.

For the side near the highway, the designers figure that walls, strategically planted trees and hedgerows, and the sound of water features should blunt the sound of traffic.

The only downside of this project is what it replaces: half of the site was home to the Bata Shoe company headquarters, desinged by the important Canadian modernist firm John B. Parkin and Associates. The Bata building was a modernist landmark in the city and (though it was basically a knockoff of a Gordon Bunshaft) it deserved some consideration. However, the new complex is going to be $200-million worth of very fine architecture and landscape. Especially in this context – just off the Don Valley Parkway, on a street where high-quality modern office buildings are being replaced by poorly designed condos and townhouses – the caliber of the design is remarkable.

Of course, it’s impossible to judge buildings that don’t exist yet. And this complex has been a very long time, nearly 15 years, in the making. But construction is now underway, and since the people driving this project have the highest of motives and no hesitation about paying for excellence, I’m betting it will be impressive. To His Highness the Aga Khan: welcome to Toronto.