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In Yorkville, architectural modesty faces death from above

Almost every time I mention Toronto’s York Square, people ask, “Where is that?” That’s a compliment to its success: its modest approach has been so widely copied that it’s almost invisible today. 

Better known as the location of the Vidal Sassoon hair salon in Yorkville, the seminal work of Jack Diamond and Barton Myers’s groundbreaking architectural firm set the architectural and planning world on its head when it was completed in 1968. We now take for granted the idea of working with and around existing buildings, but York Square was one of the first projects in Toronto to mix historic and new. It set out on a different path than the scorched earth approach to “urban renewal.” 

In 1968, Yorkville was home to the counterculture, to hippies, street kids and musicians like Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot. Toronto had not yet been hollowed out for urban renewal in the same way many American cities had, but it was charging headlong over that cliff, goaded on by planners and developers.

The development made news in architectural and planning journals around the world, and made Diamond & Myers the firm architecture graduates wanted to join. The round windows pay homage to Louis Kahn, reflecting the firm’s connections to the University of Pennsylvania, where Kahn taught.

Prior to the passage of the Ontario Heritage Act in 1975, it was hard to make the case to save lovely old buildings like Old City Hall and Union Station, let alone old houses. But the reform council of the 70s made Toronto famous as a liveable city and place of progressive urbanism.

In a recent lecture, former mayor John Sewell quoted from an article on York Square in the journal Progressive Architecture: “The first urban development to be designed in the new aesthetic idiom proves that bulldozer levelling is not the only means to popular or financial success.” The article quotes Jane Jacobs’s praise for York Square, and architect Diamond, who said, “What is new today is old tomorrow therefore working with the old is perhaps the single most important aspect of design in cities.” 

Fast-forward almost 50 years, and even though the youth movement has long since departed from Yorkville, its counterculture physical fabric remains. The old buildings with new infill and low-scale development from street to street, full of pedestrian lanes and small courtyards, now house some of the city’s most expensive boutiques, professional offices, bars and restaurants. The generation that made the place returns as well-heeled tourists.

Now Yorkville is under major redevelopment pressure, and some fear it may disappear entirely. Property owners complain that property values – and tax rates – set by OMB-fuelled redevelopment speculation are forcing rents beyond the capacity of existing tenants. That tax spiral led the Wookey family, York Square’s original developer, to sell York Square to Empire Communities a few years ago. The excellent restaurant Il Posto continues in the best outdoor patio in Toronto, but for how much longer?

Empire Communities proposes to demolish all but the corner facade and pile a massive 40-storey condominium tower on stilts above. In his recent lecture, Sewell described the scheme as “death from above,” the sketch of the proposal catching quite clearly the loud squishing sound of a development scheme that shows no respect for the past. 

What was once the template for combining new and old, using buildings to shape courtyards, would be reduced to a facade pasted on a megalomaniac “look at me” project, replacing firmly grounded masonry buildings with the structural handsprings of neo-modernism – exactly the kind of buildings set in isolated space that architects Diamond and Myers rejected in their breakthrough early practice. 

The intimate courtyard would be lost, replaced by a forecourt off Yorkville Avenue that will have none of the enclosure or quiet calm of the present space. The Ontario Municipal Board recently turned down a development on Church Street near Mc-Gill because it dwarfed the adjacent designated building and the surrounding neighbourhood. Building over, as this scheme does, is to my mind more egregious. 

Architectural Conservancy Ontario’s Toronto branch has been arguing for conservation because of York Square’s historic significance and because it is already exactly the right size and scale for Yorkville. The city has designated the property and pretty much all of the exterior features and courtyard as heritage attributes important to retain, but has yet to take a position for or against the development. It would be within its rights under the Ontario Heritage Act to refuse any demolition or alterations. But would the OMB agree? Empire Communities has appealed to the OMB, and a 10-day hearing is scheduled for January 2017. 

Catherine Nasmith is a Toronto architect and heritage planner, and president of Architectural Conservancy Ontario and its Toronto branch. 

A version of this article appears at builtheritagenews.ca.

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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