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.

To give credit where credit is due, the south facing façade uses glass in an apt manner, as a means to open the building out to the water (which it faces). A large atrium space connects the cubic-east of the building with the cubic-west of the building. The atrium allows views of the water from many of the interior points and even boasts a large double height glass door on the south wall that is set on tracks – it can be drawn open for full, unobstructed views of the water. This dynamic aspect of the building is precisely the sort of design that should be applied to all parts of a building that is located on our waterfront, if we hope to develop this still largely industrial area of the city into a vivacious downtown neighbourhood. If only the sensitivity to design that’s seen in this one aspect of the building had been applied to the entirety of Corus Quay – it could have initiated an architecturally animated waterfront and encouraged the type of development we’ve all been dreaming of.

On a more constructive note, my (mostly) negative reaction to Diamond & Schmitt’s design of the Corus Quay building got me thinking about how the general public can voice their concerns over the development of its city; how does one express one’s dislike of their city’s built form and to whom do they voice their opinions? How do we as Torontonians stop ranting about our ugly city and start directing its design towards a city that we consider vibrant, beautiful, and economically viable – a city that Torontonians and anyone else could love? For the most part, Toronto lacks a critical exchange of ideas and opinions between the architectural world and the general public. In 2006 the Design Review Panel was launched as a pilot project partly in hopes of helping to fill this gap between architecture and the interests of the wider public. The DRP was created to serve as a forum for critically accessing the development of Toronto’s built form with the aim of ensuring high-quality design in our city. Perhaps the panel wasn’t critical enough in its early days, when the Corus Quay building was brought before them as one of their first projects to scrutinize in April 2006. If you’re interested in reading the criticisms put forth by the DRP about the Corus project (in it’s early stages it was referred to as Project Symphony), or if you want to stay up-to-date on current projects under discussion with the DRP you can find the meeting minutes here:

http://www.waterfrontoronto.ca/our_waterfront_vision/design_excellence/design_review_panel