Pedestrians shoot past the empty planters of Toronto Police Service 52 Division’s front plaza. It’s a sunny and warm afternoon in March, yet few are compelled to stop and relax a moment. Then again, this is no plaza, it’s a glorified sidewalk.
The police station itself, all white, glass bricks and columns like some 1980s cocaine fantasy, is probably the second most impressive building along the downtown strip of Dundas, but the barren concrete plaza in front looks like an afterthought. Little traffic goes in and out the main entrance, since the cops enter discretely through the back, leaving the space between building and sidewalk a windswept no-mans land.
Still, it’s right in OCAD’s backyard, which explains why the square between St. Patrick and Simcoe Streets was this year’s muse for the school’s annual Design Competition.
Teams of students culled from both the art and design programs were given 97 hours to research and conceptualize, and then build models of their visions for the square.
It’s just an academic exercise for now, but councillor Adam Vaughan says part of the project’s goal is to kick-start the revitalization of Dundas between University and Bathurst. “This is inspiring stuff,” he says. “We’re about to do a Dundas Street study and I think these things will start to inform what we do with 52 Division. We have money for it, and we intend to change what is now a very brutal condition.”
Much of the funding for the revamped plaza, Vaughan says, will come from development charges for the “car-free” condo slated to go up around the corner on the current site of the Royal Canadian Military Institute.
The winners of this competition will have to settle for prize money and bragging rights alone, but it does show what’s possible if we put the city’s forgotten public spaces in the hands art students.
Entries are alternately fanciful, elegant, austere and absurd. The winner, simply titled City 52 Division, envisions crisscrossing entrenched walkways with walls of polished glass. One entry features a flowing wooden boardwalk with overhead steel mesh clustered with a constellation of LEDs, another presents a vertical garden across the building’s façade, and numerous others propose below grade features to deal with the area’s wind tunnel issues. Jane Jacobs tributes also abound.[rssbreak]
