Shortly before Christmas, construction on The One, the star-crossed tower at Yonge and Bloor, burst through the 150-metre threshold, if not the project’s financial troubles, to formally attain the status of skyscraper. While developer Sam Mizrahi’s former backers forced the project into receivership last October, the planned 91-storey luxury tower will nonetheless grow to become Toronto’s first so-called “supertall,” one of seven in the city now in the development pipeline.
Needless to say, many more very tall buildings will be poking into the city’s skyline over the next generation as new provincial planning rules compel Greater Toronto Area municipalities to significantly up-zone around dozens of major transit stations, both existing and under construction.
The question – one that will face whoever becomes the city’s next chief planner – is whether Toronto’s 12-year-old policies governing the design of tall buildings in the downtown core need to be revamped, not only to accommodate this next wave of development but also to encourage far more architectural variety in a sector that has become known for homogeneous glass-and-steel towers perched atop podiums often tenanted up by chain stores.
Toronto's skyline in August, 2007.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
The Toronto skyline in February, 2017.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Though not unique to Toronto, the tower-podium form – like our stepped-back mid-rises – is much more common here than other cities seeing an influx of high-density development, partly because city planners prespecified the type of towers they’re willing to approve.
“We have, by and large, a set of fairly generic buildings [where] the one variable seems to be height,” observes Peter Clewes, the principal at architectsAlliance and one of the leading designers of Toronto high-rises. He describes Toronto’s building-specific design guidelines as excessively prescriptive and lacking in an overarching idea of urban form. “My criticism of the tall building guidelines is that it doesn’t look at the kind of city we’re trying to create. It regulates buildings as opposed to the character of the entire city.”
The current regulatory environment, Mr. Clewes adds, has given rise to a lot of “ridiculous conversations” over heights or modifications to rules governing setbacks and the size of floorplates, but without a clear vision of how towers will shape public space. “We miss, I think, the design opportunity that intensification brings to Toronto.”
Not everyone shares Mr. Clewes’s critique. David Pontarini, co-founder of Hariri Pontarini and one of the architects of Toronto’s tall buildings policies, argues there’s enough flexibility in the city’s 92-page design guidelines to allow builders to innovate. But, he adds, “I always used to say it was a living document that did need to be updated and revised and refreshed.”
Architect and urban designer Naama Blonder, founder of Smart Density, sees something else between the lines of the city’s rule book: an abiding suspicion of high-rises that has given rise to heavy-handed controls on the form and massing of these towers. “I almost want to write a cultural chapter in the guidelines [saying] that tall buildings aren’t the worst thing.”
Shelagh McCartney, an associate professor of planning and urban design at Toronto Metropolitan University, argues that the city needs to actually create a tall-building policy that extends well beyond the downtown core. “The tall building guidelines are in too small of an area,” she says. “Given the pressures that we’re looking at, we really need to think about expanding where they’re applicable. We need to think about city building, not just downtown building, when we’re thinking of tall buildings.”
The current tall building planning regime dates back to 2006 when Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government passed the so-called Places to Grow Act, which sought to limit sprawl by directing new development to urbanized areas and transit-friendly growth nodes.
That law triggered a boom in high-rise construction in the downtown core and around growth nodes, such as Yonge and Eglinton. In 2012, the planning department set out to codify the way it wanted developers to erect tall buildings and where exactly they should be permitted.
Some of those ideas, note Mr. Pontarini and Prof. McCartney, were borrowed from Vancouver’s much-lauded 1990s downtown intensification efforts, which produced dozens of skinny high-rise apartment buildings, some sitting on pedestals with townhouses and others rising straight up, but set back from the sidewalk to produce more public space.
Toronto council approved a set of planning guidelines that explicitly banned certain types of buildings, such as “slabs” – the popular form of mid-century modernist apartment building that tends to be quite wide and is often set back from the street. Hundreds were built in both Toronto’s postwar suburbs and parts of the core between the late 1950s and 1980s.
In fact, some of those older slab-style rental buildings, such as 145 St. George St. and 25 St. Mary St., are now being demolished to make way for much higher point towers.
As Prof. McCartney says, “What’s wrong with some slabs?” She’s not the only one making this, well, point. “I’d take a 14-storey slab over a 28-storey tower any time,” says Richard Sommer, former dean of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Design. “They have this kind of very ideological idea about the way the tower should be made.”
Other common forms of dense multifamily housing – e.g. eight- to 12-storey mid-rise “perimeter buildings” that surround an inner courtyard – have been staples in high-density cities for generations, but are almost impossible to build here, says Graeme Stewart, a partner at ERA Architects who specializes in the renewal of tower blocks. Some of the core regulations – a floor plate that can’t exceed 750 square metres or 20 metre separations between buildings – “just presupposes a podium and point tower. It’s essentially inevitable because of the policy context.”
Mr. Pontarini argues that the city’s planning officials have shown a willingness to be flexible, especially on larger sites, such as The Well, the recently opened condo-office-retail megaproject developed by RioCan and Allied Properties. He also points to one of Mr. Clewes’s ventures, ICE Condos, a two-tower complex in South Core that’s connected by a low-slung modernist pavilion instead of a multistorey podium. “It was part of that whole master plan that Peter Clewes developed down there,” he says. “It’s a beautiful project.”
Still, as Mr. Pontarini allows, “it was a tough negotiation for Peter down there, but to me, that’s a really nice example of a project that doesn’t require a podium.” Most of ICE’s neighbours, however, hew to the conventional tower-podium form preferred by the city.
There are other assumptions baked into the tall buildings design book that haven’t aged all that well. The ground-floor retail spaces in the podiums, explicitly intended to animate the pedestrian realm and replicate the fine-grain commerce on Toronto’s main street, are often occupied by chain drug stores, LCBOs, fast-food outlets and medical or dental offices that keep their windows covered in deference to patient privacy. These retail venues are typically too large for independent merchants and are marketed specifically to corporate tenants.
The restrictions on the floor plate size, in turn, have given rise to the proliferation of deep and narrow units, as opposed to the wide and shallow apartments typical of mid-century slab buildings. Some developers also aim to maximize saleable floor space in point towers by providing only the minimal number of elevators – a practice that has produced the equivalent of high-rise traffic congestion in very tall structures.
A growing number of small units now include windowless bedrooms that rely on “borrowed light,” i.e., light that filters in from the windowed living rooms. “We’re essentially making living environments that are not great for humans,” says Prof. McCartney.
But Mr. Pontarini, whose firm has designed many tall towers, says it’s difficult to make generalizations about the relationship between slim floor plates and the layout of individual apartments. “I don’t think the deep unit with the inboard bedroom is only characteristic of a point tower,” he notes. “You find them in slab buildings as well.” Ms. Blonder adds that city planning officials theoretically could bargain larger floor plates if the developers can “demonstrate that they’re achieving higher quality units.”
It’s too soon to know whether or not these questions will land on the to-do list of the new chief planner (a search is now under way). But the city’s approach will almost certainly need to be further overhauled to address housing shortages, the need for more affordable rental apartments, demands from the province to up-zone around transit stations, and the proliferation of very large redevelopment sites, such as the Galleria Mall, Canada Square and a sprawling former Loblaw’s property in Scarborough, near Victoria Park and Eglinton avenues.
Asked, given all this, if he would tear up the city’s aging tall buildings policies and start over, Mr. Clewes doesn’t hesitate with his reply: “Yes, I would.”