At last. At last a new retail, office and housing development in Toronto that makes no bones about being located in the here-and-now. The Shops at Don Mills is contemporary, if politely so, without the slightest nod to Victorian London or any French chateau. This is Canada's first serious shot at the urban village, a 12-hectare open-air shopping experience that turns the mall inside out and allows about 100 shops, restaurants and services to circle a town square.
Despite its dreary name, the Shops at Don Mills matters because it's a redevelopment that rejects the kitsch mock-ups of yesteryear - a fallback position of many conservative Toronto developers. The urban villages that flourish in the United States - Crocker Park or Legacy Village located in greenfields outside of Cleveland - are not so brave. So many French mansard roofs and brick pavers. Such happy-go-lucky places of urban artifice.
"A lot of these centres ... are out in the middle of nowhere and they're looking for instant sense of place," says design architect Ralph Giannone, whose firm collaborated on the Don Mills urban village with Pellow + Associates Architects and Rudy Adlaf, senior vice-president of architecture and design at Cadillac Fairview. "It's actually better to leverage that existing sense of place."
To that end, brick in elegant taupe and buff has been used on storefronts to reflect the palette of 1950s Don Mills housing. There's a dynamic rhythm set up in the way that storefronts are articulated, with some pushing forward, others receding. The interesting relationship between planes floating up and against each other was part of what was expressed by modernist architects, such as Ron Thom. His way of using brick coursing patterns or stamping decorative patterns into Indiana limestone at Massey College inspired some of the strategies at Don Mills. Leaf motifs representing the oak, the maple and the linden - the three major trees planted within the urban village - have been custom-stamped into the stone and featured on several storefront elevations. Pitched roofs have been banished; instead, there are flat roofs and upper levels in spandrel glass painted green and blue. A second-floor eating terrace will serve shoppers at McNally's Robinson.
Originally, Giannone Petricone Associates Architects was hired to do the two 26-storey residential towers currently proposed for the west flank of the site. But their innovative mixed-use project on the shores of Port Credit convinced Cadillac Fairview to assign the firm to a full retail interpretation.
Creating the kind of visual interest typically found in any Toronto neighbourhood helped to guide the team. The Douglas Coupland-designed clock tower sits at the south side of the village green, which will be an ice rink in winter, next to an automated water fountain. About 90 Hungarian oaks selected by landscape architect John Quinn surround the park. There are the amenities that one comes to expect with privatized "public" shopping: Colourful plantings, human-scaled lighting standards, soft and hard canopies to protect shoppers from the rain. There are bike racks and dog-poop stations. One drawback is the sterile steel benches, which could have been warm-to-the-touch wood seating.
There are reasons to be cynical about the privatized urban village. American critic and sociologist William F. Whyte complained that the planning brochures for post-war housing developments used all-purpose happy language and that the images of new towns nearly always included children holding balloons.
Attracting people, dogs and balloon-happy children is part of the design gig. In lesser hands, selling the commodity in Don Mills might have turned the clock back on architecture. Instead, the Shops at Don Mills has delivered design on real time.