Nobody in Toronto can design a tall building with a bottom that works. If I've heard this complaint once, I've heard it a dozen times.
It's not hard to figure out how such criticism started making the rounds.
In Toronto's newest crop of residential skyscrapers, more than a few have shafts that are acceptably artistic, but ground floors that are dull and dutiful, and sometimes downright ugly.
The lobbies are measly, embellished (if at all) by tropicals in various states of dilapidation -- meaning the transition between apartment and outside world, which should be elegant, is unpleasant, abrupt.
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The residents' entry is small and undistinguished, while the loading dock and underground parking entrances are cavernous.
Without human activity to liven things up -- a daycare centre, let's say, or a shop, or suites with front doors on the sidewalk --the streetscapes around the towers are as good as dead.
This business of bad skyscraper bottoms has been on my mind since last week, when I dropped by Great Gulf Group's 18 Yorkville. Not because this almost-finished tall building complex at Bloor and Yonge streets is losing it at street level. On the contrary: I can't recall another new Toronto condominium development that hits the ground with more polish, decency or big-city cool. Just by being very good, 18 Yorkville makes a lot of other new condo slabs out there seem frumpy and dull indeed.
Designed by Peter Clewes of the Toronto firm architectsAlliance, the project consists of three intelligently harmonized parts, separated at grade. Along Scollard Street, which bounds the block-wide site on the north side, is the first of these parts: a horizontal, seven-storey building that Great Gulf calls The Villas. This structure has been slipped gracefully into the historic Yorkville neighbourhood.
It's not too big for little Scollard, and its rhythmic sequence of step-up street entrances recalls the terrace housing that is among Toronto's best-loved souvenirs from our Victorian past. And in a city where residential buildings tend to be either two storeys tall or 40, with too little in between, The Villas is a welcome addition to our skimpy inventory of mid-sized architecture.
The second and far more conspicuous feature in the 18 Yorkville ensemble is the 36-storey tower at the corner of Yorkville Avenue and Yonge. The third element is a public garden that landscape architect Janet Rosenberg is currently laying out on the square bounded by the tower, to the east, and The Villas, on the north.
The framing of this garden is completed, on the west side, by the Yorkville Public Library, a charmingly gruff little classical temple finished in 1907, and given a beautiful interior redoing some 25 years ago by Toronto architect Barton Myers. Taken together, the mid-rise building, the garden, the tower and old library create an excellent new urban place, with poetry, chic and swing.
The shaft of the tower is the kind of thing we have come to expect in Mr. Clewes's Toronto skyscrapers: a soaring escarpment of steel and clear glass, intensely neat, rational and serious, but with a luxurious gleam. What makes this whole project really good, however, lies in the various things that happen at the base. I've already mentioned the welcome terrace effect -- the tightened, mid-block streetscape -- achieved on the Scollard façade of The Villas.
The tower's Yonge Street face is intended to be, by way of contrast, a showy, high-street affair, with large windows and high-ceilinged shops. One can easily imagine an outdoor café on the broad apron of sidewalk that opens up at the corner of Yorkville and Yonge, peopled by the usual urban mix of rollerbladers, flâneurs, tourists from the suburbs of Toronto and the cities of America. Yet another mood, more to do with stability, intimacy and home, is struck by the mid-size façades, with their many windows, that define and brighten the central park.
By giving a different, sensitive treatment to each condition on the site -- whether the hustle and push of Yonge, the peace of Yorkville's side streets, or the propriety of the district's upmarket citizens -- and bringing them all together in one, coherent design, Mr. Clewes has done more than create just another serving of restrained modernist artistry.
Every work of architecture that's doing its job, as 18 Yorkville surely is, proposes a way of living in the world and in the city. This project suggests a way of Toronto life that accepts and celebrates the great variety of urban experiences, which (we are reminded by 18 Yorkville) can go from subtle to sensational in the space of a single block.
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