Major urban design schemes like the West Donlands take years to complete. While we wait for it to take shape, have a look at the way students at the University of Waterloo Urban Design Studio envisioned the project.

Moving our world from this . . .


to this.

For more than a generation now one of Toronto's most compelling public spaces has remained hidden in full view of the thousands of commuters who travel along the Don Valley. The Brick Works, figurative birthplace to much of old Toronto's red-orange patina, sat waiting for a purpose worthy of its potential. Then along came Geoff Cape and Evergreen ("Imagine your city with nature") and everything changed. Infused with a green vision for the city, Evergreen imagined the rusting buildings and gouged earth on the site as an ideal test bed to research urban-based environmental change. Claude Cormier, one of the landscape architects involved with the project confirmed that idea at the launch yesterday, saying there is a tension at this site between being almost downtown yet being immersed in nature.



The Brick Works produced bricks for the city from 1889 to 1984 from a 40 acre site along the Don River with a bounty of clay deposits. The fired legacy of those natural deposits can be seen most notably at the old Massey Hall and at Casa Loma's Stables--landmarks of Toronto's early exuberance as a young colony. It is ironic that today those same 40 acres may well be the home to another rebuilding of the city. In the 21st Century activities on the site will not rip up the earth and burn energy to construct the city, they will save energy to help maintain and protect it. What happens here in the next few years may well reveal how we can live well--extremely well in fact--and yet conserve the fragile natural world that is our home.



Included are images created for yesterday's launch. Evergreen is involved in a campaign to raise $55 million to achieve its mission. To date $37 million has been raised. In typical Canadian fashion, as imaginative as this project is it does not go nearly far enough (that's not the fault of the good people at Evergreen). Evergreen's project provides Toronto, Ontario, and Canada with an opportunity to become a world leader in the sustainable city movement. If we as a society are to achieve that end, important projects like this one need more funding from government and from the private sector. We need to give this project a scale comparable to building an Avro Arrow or levelling millions of acres of land for a James Bay hydro electric scheme. Until we make that kind of investment projects like Evergreen's will be seen as fringe activities rather than the truly world-changing activities they need to be.

What is wrong with this picture? it might be that our civic government is letting people occupy the street for no reason other than to garner more publicity for the condo being built at the corner of Yonge and Bloor, when they just as easily could have given them all numbers and let them go home. Or it might be that we have seen it so many times before, at or just after the peak of some boom like when gold hit $ 700 twenty years ago and people lined up on Bay Street to buy it, only to see it drop to 300 and stay there for years. Or the last condo crash in the early nineties.

This week's Fortune magazine analyzes the American housing crash and chalks it up to a very simple cause: prices got out of whack with rents. Like any other commodity, people expect a return on investment; in housing, low interest rates and no money down loans let housing prices rise so fast that there is no way that current market rentals come close to covering costs. But it is no longer about investment, it is now about speculation; it is now a bubble.

All kinds of crazy things happen in bubbles; people start waxing eloquent about location being perfect when it is across the street from the two ugliest office buildings in the city and you cannot stand on the corner in winter without being blown away. Looking at the wall of the Hudson Bay store- that's location?

People stop looking at track records and Tarion complaints and happily purchase from Kazakhstani developers that nobody has ever heard of, building to a height that nobody has ever done in Toronto for a residential building.

People start talking about all the international money flowing into Toronto as such a wonderful place to own real estate when we can't pave our streets or keep our buses running or our tourist attractions going because nobody comes here anymore, the dollar is so high. So where are all these international buyers coming from?

People forget that developers don't borrow money to build, they build to borrow money, they are gamblers who will keep doubling their bets as long as suckers come to the table and the banks keep financing them. The second the banks decide "gee, we are over-exposed in real estate" (which they will, any day, all at the same time) the industry will shut down, just like it did in 92.

Then we can go back to real estate being about places to live, not invest.

What differentiates the ROM Crystal from other Libeskind projects is its relationship to the existing ROM building. When critics suggest Toronto got a copy of a copy of a Libeskind "Crystal" they miss what really should be an obvious point: together, the existing ROM and its new Crystal become a hybrid form shaped by the two mature architectural typologies. What is evolutionary if not revolutionary is the interplay between the two forms. The contrast reframes the inward looking older museum by creating a series of staged spatial experiences from the street to the museum's inner core.

Take a look at the slideshow.