The five shortlisted designs for the St. Lawrence Market North Building architectural competition have been revealed.
Back in February, I was excited to learn about the finalists, who includes KPMB as well as Richard Rogers’s firm together with Adamson Associates. Now the designs are anonymously on display until the winner is announced June 7.
First, a bit of context (skip if you’re local). This will be one of the most important buildings in Toronto. It is an annex to the St. Lawrence Market. The North Building has been a farmer’s market for 200 years, and it faces a couple of landmarks: the main market building to the south, and the Georgian St. Lawrence Hall to the north. It will replace an unimpressive two-story modernist hall from 1967, used for a Saturday farmer’s market and Sunday antique market.
This will not be as great a building as it should be, because of the program: The city wants to drop an entire courthouse on top of the market space. It will be an office building on top of a meeting hall, on a crowded site on a Georgian-scaled block. This is not a recipe for great urbanism.
Yet, as it turns out, two of the designs really rise to the challenge. The clear winners are the Red and Yellow designs. They have an interesting feature in common: in both designs, the market space is basically in the open air.
Red (see images and PDF presentation here)
This proposal makes a simple but brilliant move: it breaks the building in half.
It joins an open-air market space with an atrium above that goes all the way up. This visually brings together the two elements, the secure courthouse and the public market, into a long, tall, bright agora. And, at the north end, it frames the cupola of St. Lawrence Hall.
To the west (see above), facing the pedestrian Market Lane, the facade breaks up into a series of separate bays; the courthouses, stacked up like lofts or apartments, seem to cluster into separate towers. This will reduce the massive quality of the building. And the facade, with sunshades and exposed steel structure, has some high-tech poetry in it. This must be the Rogers design.
Yellow (images and PDF presentation here)
This one has a truly open-air market space, which can be only partly enclosed in winter and heated with radiant floor heating.
It’s a brave move for Toronto’s climate but assuming they’ve done the math, the radiant floor heating should make it liveable year round; if so this will be a unique public space in winter. And the market will be a beautiful piece of architecture. The designers are calling for columns and a ceiling of brick, echoing the masonry of the older market building in an abstracted, modernist manner. The building take a different formal approach: it’s a block that gets smaller as it rises, opening up at the back (to the north) toward St. Lawrence Hall. In the middle is a smaller atrium.
On the other end, a glassed-in “urban porch” faces Front Street and the old market building, with a grand stair going all the way up. The courtrooms on the third, fourth and fifth floors all open in this direction, maintaining a sense of the commons.
The detailing and choice of materials, I guess this is KPMB’s work. If so, it’s a clear return to the legacy of Louis Kahn, whose influence is baked into the work of KPMB and Toronto modernism. Yet the most public face of the building is glassy and very contemporary.
The rest (Orange, Blue, Green)
The other three designs all call for an enclosed market space, with the courtrooms housed in some sort of curved volume on top.
I think the best of these is the Orange design. It wraps two curving facades around the east and west sides, and envelopes the courtroom spaces in three double-height atriums. It also has perhaps the clearest sustainability agenda of any of the designs.
The Blue design is more of a singular, blocky form – a shed, like the original market halls, but torqued and carved in various dimensions to allow for views and light to reach St. Lawrence Hall at the back.
The Green design is ho-hum postmodernism, urbanistically clunky and lacking in grand spaces. (EDIT: added image.)
You can give feedback to the jury here.