A Moriyama landmark must be preserved and go public

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One of Raymond Moriyama’s most important buildings is in danger. And the neighbourhood where it’s located needs a new community hub.

If Toronto’s government can put the pieces together, it can avoid the loss of an important heritage resource and create a new public place.

The site at stake is the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Don Mills. Mr. Moriyama designed it for his community in 1963. In the wake of his death last year, and with the Ontario Science Centre he also designed under threat, the JCCC should be a top priority for heritage preservation in the city. If it is gutted, then Toronto’s heritage regime has utterly failed.

Yet a group of developers – Westdale, Originate and Cameron Stephens – plan to dismember the thing while building two towers. Their project is moving toward an Ontario Land Tribunal hearing in May.

The project, drawn up with heritage architect Andrew Pruss of ERA, would put about 1,200 apartments in two towers. One of these would include parts of the JCCC building, dismembered and reassembled. Within the old façades would be an amenity space and some undetermined “community use,” but mostly bike storage and a car parking ramp.

No version of this is acceptable. There should be no negotiation. This building should be left alone.

The JCCC is rich in meaning and complexity. It is one of the most important 20th-century buildings in the country. In the early 1960s, Toronto’s Japanese-Canadian community needed a place to gather. Reeling from the effects of wartime internment, 75 families gathered their resources and mortgaged their houses to pay for a new centre.

Mr. Moriyama made them a small masterpiece at 123 Wynford Dr.: an ornate concrete citadel in a valley, it evoked European modernism and Japanese traditions of building and landscape.

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It also engaged within a seminal conversation in Japanese architecture at that moment: Major Japanese architects such as Kenzo Tange and Kunio Maekawa were interpreting the work of Le Corbusier in a Japanese context. On a recent visit to Tokyo I was struck by how closely Mr. Moriyama’s building resembles Le Corbusier’s lone building in Japan, the National Museum of Western Art. (Particularly its back façade, which ERA’s heritage report dismisses as insignificant.)

The JCCC served as the heart of Toronto’s Japanese community until 2003, when the organization that ran it – after a long debate – moved to a bigger building nearby. The old building was bought by Toronto’s Lalani family, and had a second life as the Noor Cultural Centre. Then came the pandemic. The Lalanis abruptly closed the centre in 2020 and sold it for $33-million.

Why was it worth that much? Because it was a development site, in the weird logic of Toronto planning, even though it’s next to the Don River and the Don Valley Parkway. That’s because it is roughly 400 metres from a stop on the new Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Recent provincial planning says it’s an appropriate place for housing. In theory, this is a walkable area.

In truth, this is a poor spot for high-density growth. But the city of Toronto cares about protecting house neighbourhoods next to the subway, so development pressure goes into corners such as this.

Around 123 Wynford, a one-square-kilometre area now has a staggering 10,000 homes in the approval pipeline. About 20,000 people will eventually move into this area, which is isolated by steep hills and the highway, has no shops and a single bus line. This makes no sense. It’s going to be a car-choked mess with little public space – like Liberty Village, but at the top of a steep hill in the suburbs.

In anticipation, the city should have purchased the JCCC site. It still could. The building and grounds could serve as a community hub, including a new library branch, cultural facilities, perhaps a daycare. Within 20 years all of these things will need to be constructed nearby, at a far greater cost, in facilities that are inferior.

Why the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre must be saved

For such a deal to be done, the city’s heritage planners will need to stand strong to keep a tower off the JCCC building. Already they have “designated” it, providing real protection. They have named a series of attributes of the building, inside and outside, which make it “very difficult,” Mr. Pruss acknowledged in an interview, “to introduce any sort of change.”

But in this case, Mr. Pruss is tasked with keeping those “attributes” while largely destroying the building. If he wins the argument, the JCCC can be Frankensteined into a new tower, generating tens of millions of dollars of value. Mr. Pruss told me that the building is “obsolete” in its current state and would need renovation for any future use.

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But that’s bunk. It would be easy to imagine how this building’s mix of classrooms and a large meeting hall could be used for public purposes: A daycare spilling out into the garden, pottery classes going on, kids reading in the grand hall of the library under Mr. Moriyama’s roof.

“I agree that could be an alternate future for the building,” Mr. Pruss said. “But I don’t know how it works financially. There need to be other partners and a program provided.”

The city needs to step up and provide these things. There is a deal to be made here, in which developers build one tower and hand over the JCCC in exchange for money and co-operation from the city. Such a deal would be unusual, but this site deserves better than the status quo. So does Toronto.