TOLive’s Center Saint-Laurent project sets precedent for high-end design

Good news for Toronto. The city is building a grand new cultural facility with input from some of the world’s leading architects.

Or, to be more precise: He hopes. Last Friday, civic theater agency TOLive announced the results of a design competition for the “STLC Next” project. The winning team is led by prominent Toronto architects Hariri Pontarini, with Indigenous firms Tawaw Architecture Collective and Smoke Architecture, as well as LMN Architects and landscape architects SLA.

The architects’ task was to take the 1970 St. Lawrence Center in downtown Toronto, a brutalist performing arts complex that was one of the country’s “centennial projects,” and replace it with a larger set of spaces including a theater, an acoustic room, a rehearsal hall and public gathering space. The plan is extremely ambitious. If built – more on that in a moment – ​​the facility would be 180,000 square feet in size and could cost up to $400 million.

One thing is clear from this process: design competitions work. The municipal agency CreateTO organized a good contest; it has won over some of the world’s leading designers of public buildings by allowing them to compete on the strength of their ideas.

And the locals won. Last Tuesday, Toronto architect Siamak Hariri and his colleagues presented their design at a public meeting alongside four other shortlisted teams. These included avant-garde New York luminaries Diller Scofidio + Renfro, world-renowned Dutch company Mecanoo, lesser-known but resourceful New Orleans firm Trahan and prominent locals Diamond Schmitt.

Four of their proposals, including the winner, are both beautiful and plausible. (The Diamond Schmitt-led design is the exception, both spatially and conceptually inelegant.)

The winning design clearly shows Mr. Hariri’s skill with space and his taste for materials. A long band of glass and wood winds along the facade; this, according to the design team, is meant to evoke a wampum belt. (This idea will need to be crafted carefully, as wampum are symbolic rather than decorative.) Inside, curved planes of limestone dance beneath ceilings clad in whitewashed wood. This hot palette is familiar from the lucent Tom Patterson Theater in Stratford, Ontario, and will likely show up at an upcoming renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

The main theater, which is very modular, opens onto a large “living room”, itself open to the street. The Hariri team’s innovation was to bring the hall’s flat floor to street level, allowing it to open up seamlessly for performances or events. The rehearsal rooms and the other performance hall are nestled on the fourth floor.

To the north is Front Street and Berczy Park, which is one of the most touristic spaces in Toronto; to the west, peaceful Scott Street, then Meridian Hall, the magnificent concert hall originally known as the O’Keefe Centre. The STLC design would add a bridge between buildings, an anti-urban idea that should be cut immediately. But it would also make Scott Street a pedestrian plaza and widen the sidewalks on Front Street. The city should make these changes now.

TOLive describes its project as a service to performing arts organizations, but also to neighborhood and downtown Toronto. “We all know downtown needs to change drastically and accommodate more people to live and play,” general manager Clyde Wagner said in an interview. The rebuilt St. Lawrence would be part of a “cultural campus” that would provide necessary studio and rehearsal space as well as space for residents to linger.

The current Center Saint-Laurent, which is a designated heritage building, would largely disappear. Only fragments of walls and skylights would remain. It’s perverse, but typical of the way heritage planning works in Toronto. I wrote that the old center should be retained and expanded. But this ship seems to have sailed.

Where does he have it? The STLC diagram is a fancy answer to a particular question, but it’s not clear if this question is the correct one.

While TOLive’s downtown revitalization rhetoric makes sense, such a large public investment in the arts could also be spent differently and in different places. Could rehearsal or studio spaces be moved to neighborhoods that have room and need a boost? Mr. Wagner disagreed with that idea, but he also admitted: “It’s the site we own, and so that’s what we work with.”

Conversely, should the center be combined with a tower of high-rise housing, perhaps including artists’ housing? Since the old building is to be demolished, the only obstacle is the city’s own planning policy.

It’s time for this project to be given more city-wide scrutiny, and it will be. This year, TOLive will present a business plan that relies on funding from all three levels of government, as well as major philanthropy, over a five-year planning and construction period. This process should ensure that the vision is realistic and supported by plausible funding. The STLC budget “is a big ask,” Wagner acknowledged. “But there is no vision without imagination.”

Certainly, this project involves the imagination. Unlike so much in Toronto, he envisions big things for government and for public design. And now that CreateTO knows how to organize a design competition, this process should be standard for all major civic projects. A competition produced Toronto’s magnificent City Hall in the 1960s. Today the city returns regularly at low prices on architecture and landscape. Mr. Hariri’s studio doesn’t design public libraries, while much lesser architects get those jobs. The Saint-Laurent project, at the very least, proves that it is possible to do better.