Welcome to Architecture for Humanity Toronto’s blog!

This is somewhat of a test-run meant to smooth out any glitches before we really dive into the world of architectural blogging and as a one-time thing we all tackled the same topic: the Corus Quay Entertainment Building (so please forgive us for the overlap). We expect exciting changes in the next couple of months as we become more comfortable with blogging...stay tuned!

My Bicycle Trip to Corus Entertainment on the Waterfront Or, Where is the Lake?



Corus Quay Building, view of northwest corner.

Photo by Andrew Chiu


By Astra Burka, OAA

Architect and Filmmaker

After being terrified by a police officer, who warned me NOT to ride my bicycle along Queens Quay during G20 week from Bathurst to Sherbourne, I decided to do it anyway. Starting from Little Italy, I get terrified crossing the “anti-pedestrian” intersection at Lakeshore Boulevard and Bathurst Street to our waterfront.

Happily, I followed the bicycle path east on Queens Quay when it suddenly disappeared at Spadina. The path never reappeared until east of Yonge, where delivery vans were blocking it.

Finally, I arrived at the Corus building that is still under construction. The official opening is not planned until September 30th. My first reaction was that the somber greenish glass façade looked like any of the sprouting towers situated on highways instead of one of the first major Waterfront Toronto projects. What was the design review panel smoking? If I had not seen the small stainless steel Corus sign at the entrance, I would not have known that this was a building housing a successful integrated media and entertainment complex. Half of the lower portion of the city facing façade consisted of metal grills for the electrical panels. Where was the water view?

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who on our Waterfront is Fairest of All?

View of west facade looking south.
Photo by Andrew Chiu

By Andrew Chiu

At first glance, the Corus building is all about the glass. After taking a closer look, it is still all about the glass, and it will always be that way because that’s what it is: ageless, hard-edged, shiny and as long as we keep it clean, always perfect.

FACTS:

Official building name is Corus Quay, located just south of Queens Quay and east of Lower Jarvis across from Redpath Sugar. It is a 500, 000 square foot, eight-storey building. It is the headquarters of Corus Entertainment Inc. Designed by Diamond and Schmitt Architects, tenant interior space designed by Quadrangle Architects Limited.

Corus Quay reminds us of a perfect and complete design for a corporate headquarter. It is a finished product straight off of an assembly line. The process is to eliminate unevenness in an effort to improve the flow of work. It is working from the perspective of the client who consumes a product. ‘Value’ is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. It is the Lean principles that come from the Japanese car manufacturing industry. It’s manufactured purity meant to fit into any context in various ways. If I secretly air-lifted the entire building and turned it around, nobody would notice it other than the Corus employees coming to work the next morning.

There is a saying: “practice makes perfect”. If you do the same thing over and over, you will do it very well, and in some cases, not much else. Perfection is a process; Toronto is a city struggling to be perfect. Our waterfront is not complete, our bike lanes are not all connected and our public transit system is too small for a growing mega-city. As we are struggling to make sense of our city, we need to challenge ourselves to confront something less defined and familiar. Our waterfront will continue to evolve in the coming years. Torontonians want to see spaces and buildings that are exciting, innovative, and colorful, instead of their own reflection on the glass as they are walking by.

Queens Quay Obstacle Course

By Douglas Robb

View of north facing main entrance.

With construction expected to wrap up later this summer, I recently visited the Corus Quay building at Queens Quay and Lower Jarvis to take a look at the progress myself. Since 2007 the project has been plagued with problems, from a dysfunctional design review panel to questionable land development practises. My original plan was to have a quick walk around the building and maybe shoot some pictures, but I quickly realized my trip would be be much more complicated than I had expected.

My route from Union Station to Corus Quay lead through an underpass and below the Gardiner Expressway. As I walked east along the Queens Quay, the sidewalk began to crack and crumble until it disappeared altogether, only to be replaced by loose gravel and rusty railroad tracks. Along the way I encountered four busy lanes of traffic, three desolate parking lots, and one sugar refinery (probably the source of that strange burning smell). Once I arrived at Corus, chain link fences made it impossible to navigate the site and “No Entry” signs silenced any thoughts of exploration. Accessibility - or the lack thereof - seems to be a serious issue that extends beyond the building site and into the surrounding urban landscape.

Boxy & Boring, Not Bold & Beautiful

By Courtney Meagher

The new headquarters for Corus Entertainment blends seamlessly into its surroundings. Boxy and plain, the 8-storey structure, officially known as Corus Quay, creates a sense of continuity with the surrounding warehouse-like buildings lining the Queens Quay: the Guvernment night club and a Loblaws mega-mart sit across the street, the Redpath Sugar factory is its neighbour to the west. However, if Toronto’s waterfront is to become a vibrant, bustling neighbourhood that engages the public, then Diamond & Schmitt’s design for the Corus Entertainment building is a foundation laid in the wrong direction.

Sure, moving a large entertainment company into a brand new edifice erected on a barren plot of industrial wasteland has plenty of economic appeal. Ideally, a project such as this will generate hope that it will be the start of a tide that lifts all boats for this east Harbourfront neighbourhood by inviting opportunities for further development around it. But the Corus Quay building falls woefully short of convincing me that this will be the outcome. A random survey would no doubt result in a nearly unanimous vote: the structure is not bold and beautiful, it's boxy and boring. The smooth glass façade attempts to give the massive square building some sense of lightness amidst all its boxiness, but this achieves only minimal success on the south side of the building, unbeknownst to anyone viewing the building from its point of approach on the Queens Quay.

They Have Built it, But Will They Come?

By Kawai Lam

Interior atrium space, looking south towards the water

Located in a fairly industrial and remote area of the Toronto waterfront, at least psychologically if not truly in distance, the Corus Quay building at the foot of Lower Jarvis Street is a vanguard of the coming changes to the area. The building is an impressive, solid, modernist presence of sleek turquoise glass contrasted against a wrap-around gray stone terrace that opens the space up to the lake's edge. Bordered on the west by the virtually finished and completely integrated man-made beach named Sugar Beach (a nod to the industrial might of the Redpath Sugar refinery right next door), Corus Quay is a prime example of the mixed-use vision of the city for the slowly appearing waterfront revitalization that it proudly promotes as "the city's new blue edge".

The eight-story building, the new corporate headquarters of the same named Canadian children's entertainment giant, is set quite back from the street of Queens Quay Way allowing it to flow smoothly into and share street presence with the city built public terrace. The terrace features grassy hills, a massive red and white stripped boulder, and is emblazoned with multiple maple leaf designs. One of the emblems seem destined to become a non contained fountain, à la Yonge and Dundas Square, from the indications of the presently non-functioning fountain jets embedded into the pattern. Framing the building, the terrace provides a sense of the site's past as an industrial dock, while acting as a patio to the building and offering encounters with the lake for public pedestrians with a polished urban sheen of a well designed city amenity. It is a multi-use transition space between the building and the adjoined artificial beach, binding the two worlds and making the quay as a whole a blurring between private and public space. This blurring is achieved through careful design....

Corus Building: Sugar and Spice and Not Everything Nice

By Cameron Barker

The revitalization of Toronto’s waterfront represents the awakening of an untapped potential symbolizing Toronto as a truly distinct and creative 21st Century metropolis. This explains why the new Corus Entertainment building at the foot of Jarvis Street and Queens Quay should have been a monumental place reflecting the grandiose presence of Toronto in today’s ever-globalizing world. Unfortunately, the building missed the point, or perhaps I did.

As I cycled my way eastward on Queens Quay Boulevard over the bumpy and pot-holed pavement of the south side bike lane, I came upon a looming gray mass: the Corus Entertainment Building woefully named Corus Quay. The building is one of the first buildings in Toronto subjected to the rigorous scrutiny of the city’s Design Review Panel, which should have resulted in design excellence; something it does not have.

What should have been a beacon summoning the city’s masses to the two new parks flanking the building’s exterior, is instead a glass and steel beam box on the waterfront. Renaissance or status quo? The answer is opaque. Either way, while I walked around the building (also a construction site), I noticed that the building’s mass and scale belittled me and did not engage with the waterfront like I originally thought it would.