Last week's sod-turning for L Tower, destined to rise on the southeast corner of Front Street East and Yonge Street, was cheerful and upbeat, as such events always are, but it left me disgruntled. What did Toronto mayor David Miller, various city councillors and this residential building's developers (all on hand for the hard-hat photo op) have to be so darned happy about, when L Tower so clearly represents lost opportunities?
As originally designed by star architect and enfant terrible Daniel Libeskind and unveiled in 2005, the tower indeed had an L-shaped silhouette. The weight of the proposed edifice fell down its gracefully bulging shaft, then curved nicely, finally hitting the ground in a projecting podium that gave the whole composition, in profile, the figure of a stout boot. This scheme was flamboyant, as Mr. Libeskind's things tend to be. But it had integrity, a contemporary spirit of architectural invention and a quality too rare among Toronto's tall buildings: real urban flair. Though shoehorned into its tight site alongside Peter Dickinson's festive, swank O'Keefe Centre for the Performing Arts (1960) - now called Sony Centre - L Tower, as first thought out, would have provided an interesting postmodern counterpoint to the older structure's sleek horizontal modernism.
The $280-million L Tower we'll now be getting has been shorn of its eight-storey podium. This element was to have contained a $75-million arts and heritage awareness complex, featuring an interactive arts lab, a banquet hall and a video cabaret space. The facility would have been a fine addition to the mix of cultural venues in the downtown core - we don't have anything quite like it - and would have boldly complemented the existing cultural institutions clustered along Front Street between Yonge and Church streets. It was axed last year when the feds and the province refused to come up with a measly $22-million each. Corporate sponsors didn't materialize. Nobody with money in this very rich city, it appears, thought that putting this unusual complex in the heart of an important Toronto arts neighbourhood was worth the bother.
The result is half a Libeskind, a shaft without a strong base. (Eaton's College Park, at the corner of College and Yonge streets, is also half a building: a strong beaux arts base without the shaft that was planned to go on top. Until quite recently, in the financial district, we had an abandoned concrete service core without anything wrapped around it. Perhaps it's Toronto's fate to be stuck with half-done architectural projects.)
The condominium shaft of L Tower, at 58 storeys, is very tall - up from 49 storeys in the original design - and the whole building is large, as Toronto residential blocks go. From stem to stern, there will be 600 suites in the structure, starting in price at about $600 a square foot and size with one-bedroom apartments at 442 square feet. The units move up from there to 2,000-square-foot penthouses, and loft suites with 10-foot ceilings will be available on some lower levels. The views to the south (toward Lake Ontario) and to the north and west (the high-rise downtown core) should be spectacular.
The south façade will be a flat expanse of glass falling sheer and straight from the skyscraper's crown. The artistry of this tower's svelte north façade is much as it was in the earlier vision: slightly narrow at the waist, billowing outward at the top before smartly curving back at the summit.
The curve in the north façade, especially at the top 15 or so levels, will create interior volumes shaped more like glass botanical pavilions than the orthogonal apartments in more ordinary residential developments. As Toronto discovered with the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, Mr. Libeskind likes to knock walls out of their conventional configurations and push space into unusual forms. The fascinating upper suites of L Tower will be examples of this artist-architect's handiwork at its most daring.
But all this drama and spirited play with light and area vanish at the bottom. There, in lieu of the exiled boot-toe podium, Mr. Libeskind has put a plaza, and a short utilitarian structure to house the residents' fitness centre, swimming pool, party room and other amenities. The developers have committed $30-million to the city to refurbish the Sony Centre, and the plaza will probably be welcomed by urban enthusiasts of the Jane Jacobs persuasion as yet another new public place, of which Toronto can apparently never have too many.
I think putting a plaza there is a waste of good downtown real estate. Be that as it may, Toronto will have to wait until another day to get a second Daniel Libeskind creation whole and complete.