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....

Adjacent to both, Sugar Beach is a strange but oddly fitting sight dotted by pink plastic umbrellas which are sisters to the yellow ones at HtO Park further west at Spadina. Spread periodically also are wooden white beach lounge chairs which complete the South Miami aesthetic. The beach is of moderate size and runs the full depth of the building and unlike at HtO Park, the sand properly goes almost right to the waters edge separated only by a narrow boardwalk. While not completely finished during my visit, evidenced by the presence of fencing and construction equipment, the beach provides an engaging, welcoming, and usable space amidst the fairly hostile industrial scale of the surrounding area. Next door is the Redpath Sugar factory and barge, and across the street there is the factory chic of the Guvernment night club. Though pleasant, Sugar Beach and Corus Quay as a whole will only fulfill its potential if people other than Corus employees use it. Given the sparse residential presence in the nearby area, the question is whether people will be ultimately willing to make the psychologically daunting trek under the Gardiner, and if not perhaps both will have to wait for the waterfront revitalization to fully complete and bring mixed use residential.

The building interacts with the terrace architecturally in multiple ways, one of which is through similarity in colour and texture represented by the gray granite columns in the front of the building that are further back replaced by similarly coloured tiled stone pillars, both of which reference back to the terrace. The pillars themselves alternate between horizontal glass block windows which are progressively in height, stacked outward. This odd melding of glass volume blocks that expand with height, along with the vertical stone pillars, blend the public stone terrace at ground level with the private almost entirely glass clad building that slightly overhangs the terrace from the second floor. Functionally the two areas are also connected as well in details such as through a large glass wall section which faces the lake in the back of the building that can be slid away to further connect the inner atrium of the building to the terrace.