Download the full 2009 edition of North York’s Modernist Architecture in PDF format. This document contains the complete, unaltered original 1997 report and inventory, along with new contributions from Lloyd Alter, Geoff Kettel, Edith Geduld, Moiz Behar, Michael McClelland, Kim Storey, Leo deSorcy, Helene Iardas, Joey Giaimo, and William MacIvor.

A word of warning - the file is large (22mb), and may take a few minutes to download. Additionally, please use Acrobat to view the document (not Preview), to ensure that the images are clear and sharp.

ERA Architects is helping out with an upcoming forum on North York’s modernist architecture that is taking place this Tuesday evening at the North York Civic Centre.  The forum focuses on raising awareness for modernist buildings and landscapes in the city.  The event includes a panel discussion consisting of Dave LeBlanc (Globe & Mail), Leo deSorcy (City of Toronto Planning Division), Kim Storey (Brown and Storey Architects) and Lloyd Alter (Architectural Conservancy of Ontario).  The discussion will be moderated by Matt Blackett of Spacing Magazine.

We will be contributing to the event by printing an update to the document, North York’s Modernist Architecture, put together by the City of North York in 1997.  The original document was developed to underline the importance of modernist buildings, and many that were featured found their way onto the City’s Inventory of Heritage Properties.  The updated document - available exclusively at the forum - will include the original in addition to new essays by the featured panelists and current photographs of a number of these buildings.

Tuesday, October 27th 2009
Council Chamber, North York Civic Centre
5100 Yonge Street
7 - 9:30pm

UC at the University of Toronto. Building designed by Cumberland and Storm, 1856-7.

This past Friday Scott gave an internal presentation about the different types of window and door openings in masonry construction, how to write about and describe each element correctly, and how these elements can help to locate a building within a specific historical period.

The presentation also included a brief tour of some architectural wonders in his home-town of Detroit, MI - many of which are currently for sale at rock-bottom prices.

More images from Scott’s extensive catalogue of architectural photographs are available on his Flickr page.

We have observed that on many buildings from the Victorian period in Toronto there is a finishing application that is often original to the building construction. This finish includes a coloured pointing of the joints (stopping), a staining of the surface (colour washing) and the application of a slim and regular representation of mortar joints that replicates fine, gauged brickwork (penciling). Working together with Paul Goldsmith of Heritage Restoration, we have reproduced this process on a recent project using a series of in-situ tests applied to sample areas of brickwork. This finishing approach may be used in future conservation work as part of the repair of existing masonry.

Modern buildings are funny things. Their proliferation has been accepted as the common typology for city forms, yet they are often perceived as a banal insertion to the city’s skyline and an impediment towards a richer public realm.

Following a recent talk at Heritage Canada’s annual conference on the adaptability of modern buildings, I was asked about the possibility (if any) of “fixing” the maligned relationship between these buildings and the public realm. I perceived this question as one that considered this association over with little chance of reconciliation.

Modernism’s indifference does not sit well with many, and it was evident that an optimistic approach on its structures’ adaptability would not be accepted with immediate enthusiasm.

In their book Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter critiqued the city of modern architecture against the built conditions of the traditional city. With the adeptness of the ‘bricoler’, Rowe and Koetter state that these early city builders had the ingenuity to maneuver within and around the city’s built forms and spaces in order to complement and integrate with their surroundings. Referring to existing conditions became a moot point in the Modernists’ agenda and was largely disregarded for an opportunity to begin anew.

With some irony, it is this disregard that opportunistically positions the current generation of city builders. Presented with these latent resources, the buildings and landscapes of the recent past are now prime for reconsideration.

As they move well beyond the years of their life expectancy, the bricolers for this generation need to rethink, react to, interrogate, exploit, and most important, understand these buildings and landscapes in order to reconsider their initial ideals and to fully explore these inherited opportunities.

Posters by French Graphic Designer Jean Carlu, brother of Jacques Carlu - the original designer and subsequent namesake of the Carlu.

(images via l/r)

In this line of work, there’s often nothing more satisfying than a juxtaposition of the historic, the as-found (generally neglected and derelict), and the restored. For your viewing pleasure, we present a few of these moments from the rejuvenation of the Carlu.

The Round Room at the Carlu - when it first opened in 1931, as-found before restoration, and after.

Detail of the central fountain, before restoration and after.

Detail of the central overhead light-fixture in the Round Room, before and after. Note the beautiful original grille set into the ceiling above the fixture, which reflects the original space-planning of the room below.  The exposed rivets in the central black band were also (originally) cleverly disguised sprinkler heads.

The main foyer of the Carlu, before and after.

Detail of the Carlu foyer display cases, before and after.  Note the unique, restored decorative air-return grille.

The interior of the Carlu is the wealth of small, custom details - from the lights to the central fountain to the return-air grilles. The grilles especially are miniature art-deco treasures, and demonstrate an artful way of elevating a necessary ‘building-systems’ component into an element which helps define the atmosphere of the larger space.

Historic photograph of the foyer of the Carlu, with grilles in place.

The grilles as they were found prior to restoration.

The restored grilles.

John Lyle’s original vision for the north-western entrance to the City of Hamilton.

Reminded me of John Lyle’s plan for Federal Avenue in downtown Toronto, linking City Hall to the north to his Union Station to the south. Civic building on a monumental scale - interesting to imagine how it would have changed both the historic development and the overall character of Toronto.

(top image from Architecture Hamilton, via myhamilton.ca, lower image altered from an original found at dreams of grandeur)

For more information on John Lyle, Coach House Books has just published a new book on his work titled A Progressive Traditionalist.

The Brick Works, located on the west side of the Don Valley just north of Bloor viaduct, is not only an ERA client but also one of Toronto’s most significant heritage sites. Besides being the source of bricks used to build many of Toronto landmarks and homes from the 1880s and well into the 20th century, the location has taken on many different narratives during its existence: a place to sleep for out-of-work people during the Depression, a dumping ground for the earth excavated during the construction of the Scotiabank tower, a secluded haven for graffiti artists, and now an exemplary model of soil remediation, mixed-use planning, and environmental regeneration.

above photos by Sam Javanrouh

But over the last decade, the Brick Works have become a de facto studio for Toronto’s ever-expanding photoblog community. While the site has long been explored by curious urbanites and industrial fetishists, it’s the photography from the Brick Works that has captured a wide audience. On Flickr alone, over 2,700 photos exist of the Brick Works. Everything from the chimney to the rusting machinery has been documented in fantastic detail.

photo by Metrix X

While ERA can’t condone this type of infiltration, we are grateful that Toronto’s photo-bloggers have taken the time to chronicle the Brick Works site. Essentially, they are the silent voice of heritage preservation in this city. Without their contribution and prolific documentation of sites like the Brick Works, many derelict buildings and spaces would have been long forgotten by the general public. By taking it upon themselves to explore damp, dark, and elusive sites, photo-bloggers have embedded the imagery of these places into the public’s consciousness.

Personally, I don’t have the inclination nor the intestinal fortitude to visit places like the Hearn Generating Station (in the Port Lands), the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital, or the Canada Malting Plant (at the foot of Bathurst), but I am indebted to the brave and curious photographers who have helped give these spaces a renewed narrative.

R. L. Hearn Generating Station by dmealiffe

Canada Malting Plant by h-e-d

Whitby Psychiatric Hospital photo by sigma

Apartment complexes at 1440-1442 Lawrence Ave. E. in Toronto

David Watkin’s book on The Rise of Architectural History has always held for me an almost Darwinian appeal — which I’ve interpreted as a delicious recognition that the cultural value related to architecture has never been static but has had its own evolutionary process.  This strikes at the heart of the idea of architecture as a monument forever holding meaning and veers towards architecture as something that is intrinsically mute.  Architecture may have cultural meaning only as an interested community applies it, from time to time.

Why and how do we apply meaning to architecture?  The publication of Concrete Toronto by ERA and Coach House Books (edited by Graeme Stewart and myself) was intended as a deliberate provocation to explore this production of cultural meaning and valuation. We didn’t approach the topic as historians, but as architects. The writing in Concrete Toronto is intentionally addressed to a broad audience leaving the theory to lurk beneath the text, theory from architectural writers like Watkins and Juan Pablo Bonta, or sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, or philosopher Richard Rorty, or even the artists General Idea. We started with some of the city’s most neglected buildings and collected what Bonta would call the pre-canonic voices — the many different opinions about the buildings and how they are perceived.  As architects we express our enthusiasms. We are honest but we also recognize that negativity does not make a city and that architects must have a heightened sense that it is their obligation not only to build buildings but to assist in the cultural production of their associated values.  General Idea asked, “if we are artists, what do artists do?” and in producing Concrete Toronto we asked, if we are architects, what do architects do?

photo by Jesse Colin Jackson

The 2006 invitation to the Toronto The Good party

This coming May will mark our fifth installment of the Toronto The Good party. Back in 2005, ERA teamed up with Spacing and murmur to produce the event in hopes of fostering a greater appreciation of Toronto’s built heritage while bringing together a mix of people from various professional backgrounds. Since the inaugural event, we’ve added other partners like the Toronto Society of Architects, Wireless Toronto, and Heritage Toronto and made the event one of the most popular during the Festival of Architecture and Design held each May. The event has been hosted once at Fort York and three other times at the Fermenting Cellar in the Distillery District. We are currently working on the 2009 location with details to come soon.

We’ve programmed the evening with different themes and games, with the most popular activity being our giant map of Toronto — eight feet high and eighteen feet wide. We ask attendees a question like “where is the heart of Toronto?” and have them place a sticker on the map identifying their preferred location (see photos above and below). The only catch is that the map shows buildings and green spaces, but no street names. It forces people to look at the map in a different manner — in order to find your desired spot you need to understand Toronto in a deeper way by being able to recognize the unique qualities of intersections, like a curve in the road or the shape of specific buildings.

The map also encourages people to talk to the stranger standing beside them, something totally un-Torontonian.

For the last two years, the kind folks from Wireless Toronto have provided us with an interactive feature that allows anyone to text a message to a displayed phone number and have that text projected onto the wall within a few seconds (see photo below). The messages can be provocative, poetic, and, um, immature. Of course, things get a little silly the later the night goes, thanks to the wine and the folks from Mill Street Brewery.

We are now preparing for the 2009 edition of Toronto The Good. We want to hear from you what kind of programming and activities you’d like to see this year. We’ll definitely have the giant map and hopefully the texting game again, but what other fun things can we add to the event?

photos by Yvonne Bambrick

ERA’s exhibit down at the Harbourfront Centre received some attention recently in the National Post, a mention on Spacing’s blog by Heritage Toronto’s Gary Miedema, and on the blog Her*itage and His*tory. We thought it would be a good time to give readers of the ERA Office Blog a little more background on the exhibit and show off some photos.

One one side of the gallery space are photos captured this winter (shown above) of buildings that existed in 1858 and are still standing today. All the photos show an address and accompanying a number of them is information on who owned and used the building in 1858. On the opposite side of the space is a detailed wall-to-wall map of Toronto, circa 1858, which indicates every building in existence at the time. Each photo has a corresponding pin that is located on the 1858 map (shown below). On the window wall are excerpts from Brown’s Toronto General Directory 1856 that describes the state of the city in that year through statistics and various data.  The historic usage and ownership of many of the buildings were found in this directory.

The choice to use a map from 1858 is not random. The maps, officially known as the Boulton Atlas of Toronto, was produced by the surveyor brother duo of William Sommerville Boulton and Henry Carew Boulton and published by John Ellis. Derek Hayes, editor of the Historical Atlas of Toronto ( Douglas & McIntyre, 2008) says the map is historically significant because  “it shows the existence or otherwise of actual buildings in the city, rather than just subdivided lots.” Also of importance is that each building type are categorized by colour: red properties are made of brick, grey properties that are hatched are stone and, grey properties that are solid are wood framed buildings. At the time, almost 80% of all Toronto buildings were constructed of wood.

If you get a chance to visit, you’ll find yourself pacing back and forth between these walls locating photos of interest on the map. But since the map is from 1858, things have changed and places and roads that you know exist today (like the intersection of Yonge and Dundas) did not exist back then. You can also discover Dundas Street has a section that runs north-south on what is now Denison Avenue. Dundas then appears again, for only a few blocks, going east-west between Bathurst and Hope (what is now Claremont) streets.

You can also discover anomalies such as modern-day University Avenue (known as College Avenue in 1858) is the combination of two previous streets: one side of the street was owned by the University of Toronto and the other side was owned by the City.

Top photo by Tom Bilenkey, all other photos by Matthew Blackett

The 1998 creation of the “megacity”, a merger of all of metro Toronto’s cities and boroughs, was the last in a long line of annexations. Places like Forest Hill, Swansea and Parkdale were once independent towns with their own municipal buildings and councils.

I was perusing the book Parkdale In Pictures: Its Development To 1889 by Margaret Laycock and Barbara Myrvold and published by the Toronto Public Library, when I stumbled across the former town’s coat of arms (Parkdale existed only as an incorporated village/town for 10 years from 1879 to 1889). Unlike Toronto’s or other Canadian coat of arms — which usually depict beavers, bears, lions, griffins, etc — the Parkdale version was much more humble and personal (shown above).

The town seal reflected the occupations of the first elected members of the village council. It was made up of five representatives: one reeve and four councillors for each of the wards (St. Vincent’s, St. Martin’s, St. Mark’s, and St. Alban’s). John Gray Jr., elected as Parkdale’s first reeve, was a nurseryman, so he was represented by the maple tree near the top; the scales of justice symbolized the barrister James B. Davis; a book for bookseller Charles Frankish; a bull’s head for butcher Joseph Norwich; and a quill for the local bookkeeper Udney A. Walker.

And just like the massive opposition to the 1998 megacity creation, the annexation of Parkdale created a lot of debate. After the votes were cast on October 27, 1888, the pro-annexationists won. Laycock and Myrvold described the the hours and days that followed: “A victory parade of about 100 annexationists carrying torches or lit brooms was led by the Toronto Bold and Iron Works band. The public arguments continued for days while accusations of cheating spread… Ex-Reeve Hugh McMath even launched an unsuccessful lawsuit to quash the vote….” An editorial cartoon in the local paper The Grip captured the mood of residents (see larger version).

Like any good professionals, architects and planners need to be constantly exploring new reading material. At the ERA office, we have a vast amount of literature on Toronto, buildings, and architectural history. Most of the books sit on shelves for months — and sometimes years — waiting for the day it can be useful to us again.

Jennifer Drinkwater, ERA’s archivist/researcher, was able to pull out a few local gems from the Toronto Public Library (TPL) for me to check out. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the TPL produced some small walking guide books that focused on specific neighbourhoods like Lawrence Park, Kew Beach, and Deer Park. In each book, up to 30 buildings and sites are profiled detailing the style of architecture, historical events, and the people who brought the building(s) to life. In the Kew Beach guide, I was particularly charmed by the newspaper ad from 1926 (see below) promoting the new houses being built/sold for $5,400 on the Scarboro (sic) Beach Amusement Park and Athletic Field. The ad screamed, “The Choicest Part of ‘The Beach’ — on the Lake — on the Car Line — 25 Minutes to Yonge!”

Most branches of the TPL usually have a section dedicated to hyper-local history — I’ve found books on Willowdale (my childhood neighbourhood) at the North York Central Library, and on occasion I explore the old local history books at Parkdale’s library on Queen at Cowan (my current neighbourhood).

Architectural Conservancy of Ont.
Archives of Ontario
Canadian Architect and Builder (1888-1908)
Canadian Architect magazine
Doors Open Toronto
Heritage Toronto
Ontario Heritage
Ontario Heritage Trust
Spacing magazine
Spacing Toronto blog
Toronto Archives
Toronto Heritage Preservation
Toronto Public Library
Toronto Society of Architects

May 3rd and 4th 2008 Jane’s Walks

May 5th 2008 - Tower Renewal Project, Festival of Architecture and Design

May 6th 2008 - Maytree Foundation Urban Leadership Conference

May 14th 2008 - Harbourfront Centre, Reading Series, Concrete Toronto

May 25th 2008- Concrete Music, The Music Gallery

May 27th 2008 - Toronto the Good, The Fermenting Cellar

May 29th 2008 - St. Lawrence Centre Forum, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts

July 3rd 2008 - Fringe Benefits at the Design Exchange

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