The city of Toronto has announced the winners of a competition for a new building at St. Lawrence Market: Richard Rogers’s firm and Adamson Associates.
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.
Here is a plan of the ground floor and an aerial rendering of the block:
The city aims for the new building to open in 2014. You can see more plans in a PDF presentation here. The news release (PDF) is here.
Footnote: The shortlisted designs were all anonymous, and I’m happy that I correctly identified the Rogers-Adamson design – and picked the winner. This was a wise choice. However, I also messed up. One of the other designs deserves real credit: the Yellow design by Montgomery Sisam and Taylor Hazell. This was a strong contender with street smarts and handsome details, and I guessed wrong about who designed it. My apologies, and my compliments, to all at MS and TH.