I have a feature on the fine Beach House by Dubbeldam Design Architects in The Globe and Mail today.

In other news: Doors Open Toronto happens this weekend, including open studio events at several architects’ offices  – Levitt Goodman and Taylor Smyth among them. City Hall’s green roof also opens officially. Nice!

Also, big news today: groundbreaking on a major cultural complex spearheaded by the Aga Khan. Full post shortly.

The Vancouver-based Patkau Architects have just won a plum competition: for new cottages on the grounds of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, with a strong green agenda. Details are here – and details of a Pittsburgh museum show (also featuring shortlisted Canadian firms MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple and Saucier + Perrotte) are here.

Yes, there is a Toronto connection. The Patkaus, one of Canada’s best and most innovative architecture firms, haven’t worked much in Toronto – but they are designing a visitors’ centre at Fort York National Historic Site, together with Kearns Mancini Architects. (I mentioned this back in January.)

Here are some images of the project, which will sit next to the 1812 fort and under the Gardiner Expressway, on what was once Toronto’s lakefront.

It will face Toronto’s historic Lake Ontario shoreline with a new rampart of Cor-Ten steel.  The centre, the architects say, “participates in an architecture of lines and liquid landscapes. The south wall of the Centre acts as a new escarpment, re-establishing the original sense of a defensive site.” Here is a detailed project description in a PDF.

Last year, the news crept out that local architects KPMB were working on the new Goldman Sachs headquarters in Lower Manhattan.

And then: nothing. There is considerable secrecy around this building, which is odd; most corporations would treat a $2-billion headquarters as a big, shiny trophy. And most architecture firms would do just the same with such a grand commission. But the building (Wikipedia) has no exterior signage, and it’s called simply by its address: 200 West Street. Of course Goldman has had some problems of optics in the past year, and has always been opposed to public displays of wealth. There’s also the question of security; this tower is directly across from Ground Zero.

The upshot is that KPMB are one of several smaller firms who designed chunks of the interior, along with New York’s SHoP and Boston’s Office dA (also working in Toronto). This puts them in very good company.

Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed – the quiet partner to the legendary I.M. Pei – headed the design of the skyscraper and reportedly drove the selection of the smaller firms.

Last week in the New Yorker, architecture critic Paul Goldberger got a tour of the place (“architecture as a well-tailored suit”), and it turns out KPMB did the top two floors. Goldberger describes a two-level penthouse of high-security conference rooms and dining rooms, decorated with architectural photography. In Goldberger’s view they “lack the panache of KPMB’s best work,” such as Koerner Hall, but fit with the modest-but-very-expensive ambivalence of the building.

KPMB isn’t releasing images (they’ve presumably been forbidden to do so), so you’ll have to use your imagination.

As a starting point, here are a couple of shots of their 2008 interior for the law firm Torys LLP (Marianne McKenna was design partner).

And KPMB has also done an entire, impressively green skyscraper in Winnipeg for Manitoba Hydro. They seem very proud of it, and no wonder.

On the other hand, I imagine that KPMB isn’t eager to show off its association with Goldman; the firm is now on history’s long list of high-powered, monied clients whose patronage comes with a stain.

But the New York building was planned a few years ago, when Goldman’s ethical and possibly criminal failings were still secret. And Goldman was clearly a discerning client. The fact that KPMB won the job of designing such a rarefied space speaks to the quality of their tightly tailored modernism.

To borrow a metaphor: Even bad guys wear good suits.

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.

This week, just a quick note. Canada’s most prestigious architectural awards were just announced, and there are a couple of surprises.

Here are the results.

The perennial critical favourites Shim-Sutcliffe won again this year – no surprise, except that they won three awards. However, the list also includes two other excellent Toronto firms I’ve written about: the small but mighty Kohn Shnier Architects for a prefab cottage, and firm GH3 for their photographer’s studio and boat house.

GH3’s win in particular is a real coup; the firm, which bridges architecture and landscape, is run by two decorated professionals, Pat Hanson and Diana Gerrard, but their office has been open only a few years and their minimal, formally exacting style – as seen in the winning project – veers away from the mainstream Canadian modernism. So, congratulations.

For more on GH3: I’ve covered their work here (an Azure magazine cover story) and here in the past few years. And on Kohn Shnier, here and here (PDF).

This new centre at York University, starting construction this spring, is the work of Toronto’s Levitt Goodman Architects.

Libraries across North America are adapting to their new role as gathering spaces – especially in universities, where studying means group work and WiFi is as important as air.

At York, LGA won an invited competition for this project and they’re now overseeing the first (17,000-square-foot) phase, a multipurpose space that combines academic support services and flexible study areas.

“The classic library can be more about security for books than for study,” says partner-in-charge Brock James. The new project “is not so much about books as about bringing together all the student supports on campus – and giving a place for students to work together.”

Inside the library’s second floor, they’ve designed a hub for student services, and then a “main street” connecting the “Collaboratory” and “Salon.”

The Salon includes reference stacks, scattered computer terminals and lounge seating for quiet work. “In the Salon, there are two great walls for displaying art,” James says, “and we are hoping to relocate two existing nail art works [by David Partridge] from the atrium.”

The Collaboratory (image at top of post) is a flex space for group study, with carefully chosen modular furniture. “It’s basically a kit of parts,” James explains. “Here’s a 7-foot whiteboard; here are some task chairs; here are a couple of tables. And let’s move them over by the window, because it’s a beautiful day.”

The flexibility and the design of these interiors – colourful, contemporary, youthful – will help to draw students in.

But just as interesting are the quiet interventions LGA has designed for the ceiling and atrium of the Brutalist building. James says, “The existing library building is a quite beautiful concrete structure, but it’s a bit alienating, a bit monumental in spots.” This is true.

An atrium extends up through the stacks. To better connect the second floor Salon with the atrium,  LGA is calling for the removal of a few walls – but adding acoustic dampening instead, so that students in the stacks can get some peace.

On the ceilings, LGA are working with the geometry of the existing architecture – a square waffle grid – while altering it functionally. Alternate squares right now are filled with acoustic tile; LGA is replacing them with wood coffers instead, for specific acoustic effects as well as visual impact.  James sums up the firm’s approach to the project this way: “You try to travel as light as possible, and work with what is interesting.”

Finally, this Learning Commons has to serve an urbanistic purpose as well. The Scott Library was part of the campus’s first wave in the early 1960s, designed a by three of Canada’s top modernist firms along with landscape architect Hideo Sasaki (history here, PDF). Today the campus has a reputation for grimness. And there are many good buildings, but they don’t relate to each other very well.

To make the Learning Campus into a hub, and give the  library more presence on campus, LGA is proposing  a horizontal LED strip light along the exterior windows. “The light will be a reading light inside and will act as a graphic element from the exterior,” James says.  These are a few moves that should go a long way to give the library a new look and new relevance.

Anybody with an interest in design can name a great modernist building or a great piece of modernist furniture. But what about a public space? Or a work of landscape design?

In Toronto, the city’s most famous public space, Nathan Phillips Square, is a modernist classic that is much loved, indeed one of the best spaces of its kind in the world. But it’s far from perfect, and now it’s getting a renovation that sets an example for how such projects can be updated: with green roofs, ecologically sensitive planting, a better mix of functions and better connections with the city.

A rendering of the finished square, as seen from the southwest.

Some background: Nathan Phillips Square sits in front of Toronto’s City Hall (more info here). The products of an international competition in 1958 (beating an entry by I.M. Pei), they form a beautiful ensemble of curvaceous Scandinavian modern. City Hall’s two curved towers rise from a rectangular base, and wrap around a round council chamber. The concrete-paved square holds a pool that becomes a skating rink in winter, cradled by a set of flowing arches – and the square itself flows up a ramp to the top of City Hall’s first floor, and from there to an elevated walkway.

The square hasn’t survived as well as the building. The Finnish architect, Viljo Revell, died in 1964 before it could be completed. And though the square has become Toronto’s central gathering place since it opened in 1965, it was always a bit stark and poorly detailed. The elevated walkway was never that great an idea – a largely featureless concrete ribbon – and it was eventually closed. The square features a cheaply built pavilion, a peace garden added in the 1980s by city designers, a temporary stage, and an accumulated mishmash of furniture and service sheds.

Plant Architect, the principal designers of the new scheme, refer to all this stuff as “clutter.” And in a gesture of respect for the original design, they will basically clear the square – but instead of leaving a blank slate, they’ll add a set of subtle and eco-friendly interventions, along with better-quality pavilion buildings. It’s a sensible compromise between the formal purity of the original and the sort of plaza that’s actually comfortable to wander through and linger in. They won a competition that wound up in 2007.

Water features: view looking north, from the southeast corner.

In the square itself, a series of “disappearing fountains” will let visitors get their feet wet, and lighting built into the square will visual interest – all without disturbing the plane of the square.

Green roofs on top of the building’s podium will dramatically reduce the heat island effect and totally transform the elevated spaces. Those are clearly visible on these plans. And in fact the entire square is a green roof in itself, capping a giant parking garage; around the edges, Plant has called for denser plantings of trees that will add shade and green the site.

Also included in this $42-million (Cdn.) project will be new buildings: a new welcome pavilion with bike lockup and stair to underground; a new restaurant; a new pavilion to serve the skating rink; and a permanent theatre.

Info kiosk, southeast corner

Restaurant building, southwest corner

Theatre, looking southwest

Plant, a small firm whose practice produces high-quality architecture, landscape and urban design, will no doubt do a fine job of detailing these buildings. (Architects Shore Tilbe Irwin and Partners are also on the design team.) And the restaurant, in particular, will give more people a reason to linger here. I’m confident that it will be urbane as a city’s main square should be. (The eats will definitely add an alternative to the chip trucks and hot-dog carts that dominate there today.)

Landscape architecture has gone through a great deal of change in the past couple of generations: today’s most innovative parks playfully integrate the natural and the wild, and explicitly build on the urban, industrial and architectural history of their sites. (New York’s High Line is the most high-profile current example. See my piece about it in the Globe and Mail here.)

This project reflects those changes only in subtle ways: the greening of the site, the choice of trees and relatively wild plantings instead of more formal ones. But unlike in contemporary work by West 8, Michael van Valkenburgh Associates or James Corner Field Operations – all currently working in Toronto – there’s nothing radical here, which is a direct response to the city’s competition brief and I think the right attitude in this case. (One of the losing competition entries, by Rogers Marvel Architects, Ken Smith Landscape Architect and duToit Allsopp Hillier, shows how a more edgy approach might have played out here.) As it is, the square will remain a square, and maintain a clear division between the artificial (the plaza) and the natural (the gardens around the edges).

This project is primarily about basic urbanism and about preservation of an old idea – the plaza as a gathering place -  that’s worked well here for 45 years and has a long, proud history. Toronto does not take good care of its modern past, and too often it’s been hostile to the best of contemporary design. This should be a welcome exception.

This is what was behind Philippe Starck’s grin.

The French interior designer – or rather his billboard-scaled likeness – lorded it over Portland Street for a few years as this condo building was under construction. His name and image sold these apartments quickly and expensively. Now he’s gone, and the building itself, by Toronto’s Core Architects, is getting its final touches.

I like this element on the front facade; it includes the fire hydrant, a piece of infrastructure that usually sticks out like an untreated wart on contemporary buildings. Here it’s on display right next to the building’s address-slash-brand name.

Even better, there’s a striking contrast between the smooth, glassy surface of white Corian and the mottled structural concrete. That makes art out of the gap between design imagination and construction reality, recalling what Le Corbusier did 60 years ago with his Unite D’Habitation: In both cases the concrete bears the imprint of the cheap boards that were used to form it. That was revolutionary in the 1940s. Today it seems like a modest expression of Modernist ideas about honesty of materials.

Unfortunately, it’s about to get covered up again.

The concrete will be faced with a white epoxy, which should give it a smooth texture. If it works out well, the architecture will become an appropriately slick, Mediterranean container for Starck’s interiors.

That’s too bad. Judging from the model suite and renderings, there’s nothing very interesting about Starck’s work here: it will rehash what he’s been doing for the past decade and beyond, with his trademark Alice-in-Wonderland juxtapositions of scale, high and low materials and historic references. There’s just one interesting move, a long communal table that will occupy the building’s courtyard; this could be a magical space, four or five months a year, for a while, if it’s well maintained.

Anyway, Starck himself has been dismissing the relevance of his own work.

Meanwhile the building’s design and its facades will put their mark on the city for decades to come. The project, at a glance, is good, creative architecture: it has an unusual and I think beautiful form, with one and two-storey units interlocking, and the building holds a (relative) variety of apartments that should help generate a diverse group of residents. Too bad these meaningful ideas have had to be dressed up with a shallow coating of hype.

(Photos by me)

Atom Egoyan’s thriller Chloe opened this weekend, and it’s gotten a lot of attention in Toronto. Though it stars Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore, it also features Toronto prominently, and frankly, as its setting.

For those of you who aren’t locals, this is a big deal: Toronto’s sizeable film and TV production sector generally uses the city as a substitute for Chicago, or (with effort) New York, or simply Anytown, U.S.A.  My Globe and Mail colleague Liam Lacey wrote about these issues this weekend.

But the film also employs a contemporary house as one of its primary settings. It’s the Ravine House, by local firm Drew Mandel Design. The couple at the heart of the film’s narrative (played by Moore and Neeson), driven apart by insecurity and infidelity, call this place home. It’s easy to see why Egoyan chose the house. It offers high visual drama, seemingly teetering on the edge of a ravine, its back facade a collection of hard steel and crystal-clear glass.

But why must the residents be so unhappy? This perpetuates a long-standing cinematic cliche that casts modernist interiors as lairs of the bad guy, and refuges of the buttoned-down and miserable.

I wrote about the house for the Globe and Mail two years ago, and my piece talked about the tension between the house’s austere materials (including steel I-beams and exposed concrete block) and the owners’ goal of creating a “very homey” and “very warm,” as well as a very contemporary, environment. I certainly don’t know the owners, but they seemed to live an informal and family-centric home life. More to the point, they’ve put substantial time, thought, and money into creating a unique home for their family, and were generous patrons to an emerging local architect. So how does a house like this, born from nesting and careful architectural art, come to signify emptiness and cold silences?

Interior, Ravine House. Photo: Tom Arban