Blurred, soft, faint and flowing: Flou is a French word of such import that it should be a required addition to the English language. Because Toronto’s new Sugar Beach is flou, it yields an impressionistic landscape rarely attempted in the hard-edged cities of North America.
Don’t confuse the pale pink umbrellas rising from the cream-coloured sand as design weakness. The advantage of flou – besides allowing for willow trees, granite rock and pink parasols to be read as sensory touchstones of colour and texture – is that it emphasizes the rigidity of Corus Entertainment corporate headquarters constructed next door.
It’s a bit like spying Jackie Kennedy sheathed in shell-pink chiffon and sparkling sequins sitting next to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a shapeless black suit. On a tiny, two-acre (eight-tenths of a hectare) park on Toronto’s central waterfront, Montreal’s Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes has accomplished a mesmerizing distraction from the dark green mask of Corus.
Such is the unsettling truth of the central waterfront as it is being currently rolled out – beautiful moments in its new public space marred by the construction of ordinary architecture.
The headquarters of Corus Entertainment: sustainable, clunky design.— Sarah Dea/The Globe and Mail
The chunky green-glass Corus building was one of those Waterfront Toronto cloak-and-dagger secrets, once referred to mysteriously and misleadingly as Project Symphony. Its architect, Jack Diamond of Diamond + Schmitt, had been hired without a design competition by the Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO), a city agency that owns more than 60 per cent of the 1,000 acres in the city’s downtown brownfields known as the Portlands. Diamond had previously worked as a consultant for TEDCO on the precinct plan for East Bayfront, just next door to Toronto’s Harbourfront.
Given that Diamond has made a career of creating buildings designed to fit into the streetscape rather than express something individualistic or exuberant, the match was made in heaven: Emotional architecture is not what TEDCO, wanted. Flou? Feed it to the seagulls. In its wisdom, TEDCO – representing the Toronto taxpayer – wanted something glassy and generic.
Why? “The market pays for view. View was paramount,” says project architect David Dow. Still, was it really necessary to promote something this indistinguishable on one of the city’s grand-finale waterfront sites? “It had to be a generic enough office building that it could satisfy other tenants in the future,” explains Dow. Imagine for yourself the hint of regret in his voice.
In response, Diamond + Schmitt created two glass office buildings linked by an atrium. Hardly a jewel, but, nevertheless, a competent design solution. The glass is dark green – not the golden colour of glass kissed by the sun, as it appeared in one of the earlier renderings from 2007. It’s sustainable, smart design; but to the eye, it’s a corporate clunker.
Corus Entertainment is one of Canada’s largest media-and-entertainment companies, owners of radio stations Q107 and The Edge, animation house Nelvana and Kids Can Press. Its new office and broadcast centre is planned for completion in late September, although a majority of its 1,200 employees has already moved here from disparate sites across the city.
In the earlier renderings, there’s a groovy permeability to the headquarters: The big glass doors on the building’s west side are opened wide, allowing masses of people, gathered on the stone promenade and sitting on the massive Sugar Beach hump of a rock, to look in at the TV studios. You can almost picture Lady Gaga arriving to flaunt her latest headdress.
