The disappearance of an above-ground parking lot in downtown Toronto is always an occasion for rejoicing, because each is a blemish on the urban fabric. That’s why I was glad to learn that the bulldozers have begun tearing up the lot on the southeast corner of the block of Yonge Street between College and Gerrard streets.
This activity is making way for the Canderel Stoneridge development group’s mammoth residential skyscraper known as Aura. The tower will close the last yawning gap on Yonge south of Bloor Street and, at least for that reason, is a welcome addition to our downtown’s dense streetscape.
Everything about this building is big. Topping out at 75 storeys, Aura will be the tallest residential structure in Canada. There will be 200,000 square feet of retail area in the spacious four-level podium, including an entire floor leased to the American chain Bed Bath and Beyond, hitherto a phenomenon of the suburbs, and a 40,000 square-foot health club.
The 931 units could offer shelter to some 2,000 people, who will surely be affluent and interested in ample spaces: Prices start at $715,600 for an 859-square-foot apartment, and range upward to $17.5-million for an 11,370-sq.-ft. penthouse. On the technical side, the immense weight of the edifice will be carried elegantly downward along a massive central tube and just eight perimeter pillars, to insure that the retail interiors at the base will be column-free.
I don’t have anything against large buildings in principle. But when is a big building simply too big? Take the base of Aura, for example. This structure, clad in limestone and granite, will muscle its way out to the very edges of Aura’s 65,000-square-foot site, leaving no room for green or public space at the margins. While we expect inner-city towers to meet the city in a tough manner, Aura seems to be overdoing it, pushing too hard against the sidewalk.
To this objection, architect Berardo Graziani replies that he is providing 20,000 square feet of greensward on top of the four-level podium and, anyway, the main retail entrance to the base will face Barbara Ann Scott Park, the mid-block green space behind the College Park mixed-use development just to the north of the Aura site. (An east-west corridor leading from Yonge Street to the park will lie along the alignment of little Hayter Street, erased long ago to create the one, big block Aura will stand on.)
Even if one agrees with Mr. Graziani’s argument – I don’t; a more slender tower, with public areas round about, makes more urban sense at this point on Yonge Street – my problems with this tower don’t end there.
Like large size in general, great building height doesn’t bother me, at least not as a rule. It only does so when the structure boosted to the sky falls short of making a substantial contribution to the skyline. The top of Aura, to take a case in point, will be visible from far and wide. But if renderings are anything to go on, the 20-storey curving blade of light blue glass, positioned above a conventional window-walled block, will not be architecturally distinguished enough to stand out forcefully against the sky. The thing Mr. Graziani is proposing belongs to the 1970s, or so it seems to me, not the contemporary moment in tall-building design.
But here again, Mr. Graziani stands firmly by what he has done. In crafting this building, he wished to have no part in the disjunctive, ironic or otherwise limit-testing moves common in avant-garde design nowadays.
“Personally,” he told me, “I tend to think buildings that are there for the initial shock value don’t fare well in the longevity and future of the actual structure. It has to have staying power, it has to be somewhat classic in design. … That’s the approach we take with our designs. They are not the most eccentric, but we do believe they will stand the test of time.”
While I don’t agree with Mr. Graziani’s characterization of the advanced tall-building art, neither do I mean to single him out, or Aura for that matter, for being insufficiently up to speed. Skyscraper design is everywhere lagging behind other forms of artistic enterprise. My worry is that it will never catch up, and that, at the end of the current construction cycle, our new downtowns will look like they were put up 40 years ago.
But even if they do, there is some slight consolation in the fact that many parking lots will have disappeared in the process.
