In the spirit of the gift-giving season, I've decided to end the year by handing out some architectural awards for Toronto's best and worst residential projects of 2007. I've seen some knockouts in both categories over the course of the year now passing away, but what follows is the cream of the crop.
Drum roll please!
Fixer-upper prize for best renovation
The winner, hands down, is the team of Tom Payne, Eric Jensen and David Jesson, all of the Toronto architectural firm Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg, for its eminently sensible redoing of an 8,500-square-foot modernist villa in The Bridle Path neighbourhood.
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Originally designed for a two-acre site by Toronto architects William Carruthers and William Grierson, this long, low-slung house from 1969 is a classic product of its era: floor-to-ceiling glass walls enclosing an open flow of space, all sandwiched between flat horizontal planes of concrete.
But by 2003, when the current owners moved in — a young couple with a growing family — the building needed serious freshening up, as well as more extensive surgery. Whereupon began the renovation and renewal of the place by Mr. Payne and his colleagues.
The designers introduced new glass and leather sliding doors in various places, much improving the internal rhythm of spatial compartments.
Opaque exterior walls that served no purpose were opened by large windows, and the old carpeting and linoleum flooring were replaced by a dark tropical hardwood that complements the handsome walnut cabinetry and trim put into the house in 1969.
The result is an overhaul of the best sort: sweeping, yet mindful of the modernist values celebrated by the original.
King Kong award for worst new residential tower
This is a toughie, so take your pick: Architect Roy Varacalli's 80-storey 1 Bloor East certainly qualifies, but so does Berardo E. Graziani's 75-storey Aura, slated to go up at College Park. Both buildings are destined to occupy prominent spots along the downtown stretch of Yonge Street, and there's the rub:
Neither high-rise will bring much in the way of strong design to its outstanding location.
Instead, we are to get huge, bland stacks of concrete and glass with all the charm of a frumpy office tower from the 1970s.
All told, 2007 was a skimpy time for Toronto fans of tall buildings. A few acceptable towers were unveiled — among them, the Four Seasons hotel-apartment complex in Yorkville — but we saw nothing that forcefully embodies the liveliest and most creative tall-building ideals of our time.
Jane Jacobs medal for urban valour
The winners in this category are the members of the community group Active 18.
Based in the neighbourhoods along Queen Street West, this movement of artists, artisans and other creative people has been fighting for years to save Queen's Victorian streetscape from the ill-suited schemes of real estate developers.
The ante was upped again earlier this fall when Baywood Homes proposed a group of ghastly pseudo-Victorian condo complexes (designed by architect Brian Sickle) for the south side of the street, between Dovercourt Road and the Gladstone Hotel.
Despite an almost total lack of success so far, Active 18 has shown no signs of lying down and letting the architectural integrity of Queen be ruined without a struggle. The group should be applauded for its determination.
Who'd-a-thunk-it? prize for worst house
This award goes to Toronto architect Richard Wengle, for his shocker on Forest Hill Road at Heath Street West. This flamboyant precast concrete building is a hectic, bulging little encyclopedia of everything architectural modernism, for good reasons, denounced and abandoned: colossal square columns in the Corinthian order, whimsical wrought-iron balconies, patches of bas-relief mythological sculpture, scraps of Versailles and other frivolous ornaments from the historical dust bin. Like the many other ancien régime fantasias sprouting up in old neighbourhoods across Toronto, this house is out of place in a modern city.
It also cuts rudely against the grain, the general sense, of the Forest Hill area. For all its rather dour propriety, and the mediocrity of much of its architecture, the neighbourhood has integrity that an architect offends at his peril. The extravagant house by Mr. Wengle is just such an offence against a part of town that has traditionally avoided show-offish gestures — but that's now getting far too many of them.
Why-we-love-hogtown award for best house
Though not the largest house I saw in 2007, nor the grandest project I wrote about during that time, Toronto architect Paul Raff's new residence in Forest Hill is by far the most beautiful residence I visited.
Mr. Raff is an artist of light. He loves it with the passion of those old-school modernists who built houses of glass, and he celebrates sunshine in every project he undertakes. But unlike some pioneering minds of the modern movement in residential architecture, who liked to invite direct sunlight into every nook and cranny, Mr. Raff is interested in the subtleties of light — the infinite variety of ways it can be modified and modulated to create aesthetic effects.
The artistic result, as we have it in this modest, average-sized house, is a distinctively poetic modernism, freed from starkness and too-great simplicity, yet loyal to the clarity of the best progressive residential architecture of yesteryear.
The inside of the house, for instance, is not uncomfortably awash in brightness. Light falling through the expanse of clear glass on the south facade is filtered by a perforated black slate partition that generates a play of light and shadow on the open-plan interior that changes through the course of the day.
This house is experimental in the best and most creative sense of the word: a probing, elegant investigation of sunshine.
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