The east end of Toronto’s Port Lands is a dusty, feral landscape, thick with wild thistles and growling trucks. One block of Leslie Street houses an aggregate yard, a water treatment plant and a supplier of ready-mix concrete.
Last week they got an unlikely neighbour. Leslie Lookout Park, which opened Saturday, is a place like no other, a white-sand beach lined by rolling hills and punctuated by a viewing tower that overlooks the downtown skyline.
The 1.9-acre site was designed by the late Montreal landscape architect Claude Cormier, before his death last year, and his firm CCXA. Like Mr. Cormier, the space is charming and full of twists. From Leslie Street, a path cuts diagonally between shrub-lined hills to the tower, a 13.5-metre concrete cylinder pierced by arch-shaped cuts. Walk up a long, spiralling ramp and cross a bridge to the tower, and the heart of the park reveals itself: the soft surface of the beach, and beyond it a long westward channel trafficked by cargo ships.
“It is a strange place, an urban industrial wilderness,” says CCXA co-president Marc Hallé, who led the design with Mr. Cormier. The CCXA design knits together references to the place’s natural past as a sandbar and its industrial present.
The park is also the first major public space to be constructed within Toronto’s Port Lands, which will house about 40,000 people. “This is the first chance for the city to imagine what this neighborhood could be like,” Mr. Hallé added.
In CCXA’s vision, it is a place for cyclists to stop before entering the adjacent Tommy Thompson Park, get a drink of water and service their bikes at the base of the tower. It is a place for families to play in the sand; for picnics at the custom-made pine tables; and for parties. As Mr. Hallé points out, there are no neighbours. Put a sound system on the beach and call the DJ.
Mayor Olivia Chow confers with Vic Gupta, CEO of CreateTO, the real-estate agency that largely financed this project on land it owned.
The $8.5-million project was delivered by CreateTO, Toronto’s real estate agency. It’s strange to see them building a park. But they owned the land and ran the design and construction process, including what CEO Vic Gupta calls a “controlled design competition” in which ideas were the most important criterion.
That is how procurement should work, and the results are excellent. Leslie Lookout continues a streak of great public spaces in Toronto – Evergreen Brickworks, Sugar Beach, Corktown Common, The Bentway – created outside City Hall. Why are the best parks not made by the Parks department?
This one is unique, conceptually clear and packed with ideas. Even the tower, designed by GH3 Architects, is a significant work of architecture. A concrete cylinder that resembles adjacent storage silos, it’s a finely tuned machine to deliver views of the surrounding landscape.
In the black-painted interior, arch-shaped windows look out on the four cardinal directions; straight above, a round window looks up to the sky. Architect Pat Hanson of GH3 likens it to the Skyspace works of James Turrell.
Designers have carefully chosen the trees for this space. Further inland, 45 species have been clustered tightly, according to a Japanese botanist's method for producing tall, lean trees with a single canopy.
(By the foot of the tower, the city’s standard waste bins, ungainly hunks of blue plastic, undermine all the effort and expense put into the place.)
At the landward side of the park, two green areas have been planted with 5,000 plants in 45 species to create a “Miyawaki forest.” This technique, developed by a Japanese botanist, involves planting selected forest species tightly, “so that they will grow very tall and lean,” said landscape architect and ecologist Heather Schibli of Dougan & Associates. “They’ll respond to each other and create a canopy together.”
This approach is unproven; we’ll see how this peculiar forest grows, and whether the city’s Parks staff provide the right kind of care. But the spirit of innovation and experimentation is welcome. For that we have to thank CCXA, particularly Mr. Cormier. He was a tireless explorer, a people person who gleefully pushed the limits of Canadian propriety. In Toronto’s Berczy Park, a fountain in which ceramic dogs are spitting water? Why not? In Montreal’s Place Ville-Marie, a 30-metre stainless steel ring that evokes a sex toy? Pourquoi pas?
Mr. Cormier was one of the greatest landscape architects the country has ever seen. Last week, the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects announced he had posthumously won the 2024 Governor General’s Medal in Landscape Architecture, their lifetime achievement award.
Claude Cormier, who designed Leslie Lookout Park, died last September at the age of 63.Will Lew
“Claude was a big proponent of space that allows people to be themselves, in close proximity to other people being themselves,” Mr. Hallé says. “And you see that in the parks, whether it’s Berczy Park or Sugar Beach. There’s a certain relaxing of the shoulders that happens there. People enjoy each other’s company, and flirt, and feel good.”
CCXA promises to carry on this communal legacy. With luck, our governments will appreciate it, too. Last summer, Mr. Cormier was terminally ill with cancer, but he came to Toronto for the opening of CCXA’s Love Park. There, he asked me to introduce him to the head of Toronto’s Parks, Forestry & Recreation. After 15 years of his work in Toronto, he said, they’d never met. Four politicians gave speeches that day. No one invited him to speak.
Mr. Cormier died that September, leaving a video in which he recalled this slight. “We, as landscape architects, have to fight to show our presence and what we do for our communities and our cities,” he said. “We have to scream.” There are no screams in the design of Leslie Lookout Park, but a strong message for our leaders: Design matters, and we must empower the best designers to build a more beautiful city.
