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Usually they don’t but, occasionally, the architects of large-scale, multiphase condo developments surprise us.

Look, for example, at what Montreal designers Gilles Saucier and André Perrotte have done with River City, the residential complex in downtown Toronto’s east end. Unveiled five years ago, the first building on the site was a dark, retiring mid-rise laid out on an irregular pentagonal plan, instead of being shaped like a cereal box or milk jug. Mr. Saucier called it “a black art object, something with materiality that will look very strong and expressive on the site.”

The second structure to go up was a bundle of white, linked, sculpted blocks. But, while each of River City’s first two phases differed artistically from the other, the contrast between them hardly prepared us for the leap to the third phase, made public last year. It’s a 28-storey tower from which light-framed units dodge in and out, like small drawers opening and shutting in a tall bureau. The building promises to deliver flair and punch that the earlier parts of the River City complex didn’t.

For Pier 27’s second phase, Peter Clewes’s irregular stack will feature customary suites at customary prices. (Photos by Norm Li)


Pier 27 is taking shape on Toronto’s inner harbour, east of Yonge.

Or, for a more recent example of the same phenomenon, consider Pier 27, the hefty condo project gradually emerging beside Toronto’s inner harbour, just east of Yonge Street.

Designed by the prolific Toronto architect Peter Clewes for Cityzen Development Group and Fernbrook Homes, Pier 27, so far, has been a group of massive, glassy, slightly angled oblongs that range in height from 10 to 14 storeys. Mr. Clewes dropped huge bridge-like structures on top of the blocks, joining them in the sky. The result has been a notable instance of broad-shouldered, industrial-strength (if somewhat overmuscled) residential modernism, commercialized and updated to the 21st century, (When thinking of precedents in high-art architecture, the attractively bold formal experiments of Soviet avant-gardists during the 1920s come to mind.)

In August, Cityzen and Fernbrook invited me to have a look at a model and renderings of Pier 27’s next phase,

Travelling down to the sales centre on Queens Quay East last week, I formulated an idea of what I expected to find. It would be, I imagined, more of the same. Mr. Clewes, after all, rarely surprises. Each of his 20-odd Toronto buildings has been a credible, popular interpretation of the classical modernism he believes in. There’s not an oddball in the bunch.

“That’s how my brain operates,” he told me during a recent conversation. Modernism “is about rationalism, it’s about creating a commodious building, it’s about simplicity, timelessness, honesty. Of all the other movements in architecture we can think of in the last 400 years, it’s the one that has really stood the test of time, in terms of its basic grounding in a civilized, middle-class, collective society.”

I discovered at Pier 27’s sales pavilion that the scheme’s next phase, a large 35-storey tower, will carry on the architect’s tradition of “commodious building.” But it will do so with an intriguing twist on the old condo stack.

Instead of expressing literally the rectangular, box-like steel skeleton – the usual thing for a modernist tower to do – the exterior will pinwheel upward from the ground. The profile, defined by the fritted-glass edges of the variously-shaped floor plates, will twist, jut and cut away, creating strongly rhythmic façades on the structure’s four sides. Renderings show these elevations to be dramatically jagged, irregular – and, as Toronto condo façades go, pretty exciting.

That said, Mr. Clewes’ design will not test the ingenuity of the structural engineers or marketing people. The framework will not wiggle or bend. Inside, the tower will feature an array of customary suites at customary Toronto prices. But were Mr. Clewes’ internal arrangements more eccentric than they are, I have little doubt that the Cityzen-Fernbrook partnership could realize them. The portfolio of the joint venturers, after all, includes Beijing architect Yansong Ma’s curvaceous, imaginative Absolute skyscrapers in Mississauga and Daniel Libeskind’s unusual L Tower in the city centre. Compared with these designs, Peter Clewes’ highrise at Pier 27 (apart from its external treatment) is basically conventional.

By hanging an interesting skin on a routine book, and pitching his building to average home-hunters in this “civilized, middle-class, collective society,” Mr. Clewes also makes an important point. It’s that commercially viable high-rise architecture need not be boring, and can in fact contribute something vital to the city’s streetscapes. We can hope local residential developers and their architects take this message to heart before another generation of so-so towers sprouts on Toronto’s skyline.