Celebrated Toronto Art Deco tower victim of growth

The past isn’t just a foreign country, it’s one against which we are at war. On every corner and at every turn, it seems, the battle rages. With each passing week, another historic building, or potential heritage landscape, comes under attack.

The city, of course, is only too happy to allow the destruction to continue, typically demanding nothing more than a token saving of a façade or two, if that.

It’s been called “façadomy,” and the term is painfully apt. Throughout Toronto, any number of fine old buildings have been reduced to an exterior incorporated, carbuncle-like, into the larger exterior of its successor.

The Bay-Adelaide Centre is a good example; its sleek surfaces are interrupted by the mummified presence of the 1920s tower that originally occupied the site. Neither benefits from the forced marriage.

The corner of King and Sherbourne is also instructive; there, an important (and designated) former hotel from the 1860s will become an uncomfortable element of a glass condo tower now under construction. The condo’s name — Bauhaus — only adds insult to injury.

Next on the list of buildings to be destroyed is the 1928 Concourse building, one of Toronto’s most striking Art Deco office towers. Sitting on the northwest corner of Adelaide and Sheppard Sts., it will be reduced to two façades, one of which includes the wonderful entrance mosaic by J.E.H. MacDonald, member of the Group of Seven.

These will be dismantled, cleaned and reassembled, then joined to a new 40-storey glass tower. To be fair to the developer, Oxford Properties, the design comes from one of New York’s most accomplished architectural practices, Kohn Pederson Fox, known in Toronto for the Ritz-Carlton and the RBC/Dexia buildings, both superb additions to the skyline.

Also laudable is Oxford’s stated intention to seek a LEED (Platinum) rating for the tower.

The price, as so often seems the case, is a recognized historic structure, one the city itself has declared significant. It may be a fabulous piece from a storied era — it opened just three years after The Great Gatsby was published — but it’s not hard to understand why Oxford wanted to get rid of the Concourse. This project actually goes back a couple of decades, when the idea was to dismantle the whole building and reassemble it with taller floor plates.

Refurbishing an 85-year-old speculative office tower would be ruinously expensive and complicated. So much easier just to tear the damn thing down and save a façade or two.

What gets forgotten is the notion that the Concourse has economic value because it’s a heritage site. There are many businesses in Toronto that would choose to be in a local Art Deco masterpiece, but they’re not the sort that interest Oxford. Its focus is strictly corporate. It provides top-of-the-line AAA office space; that means convenience, not character; brand new, not historic; efficiency, not charm.

There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s exactly what companies like Ernst & Young, the main tenant, want. Who can blame them?

But that doesn’t bode well for the future of Toronto or its heritage, which will cease to be a part of the city except as a series of partial architectural artifacts — objects, like the Concourse, on display behind a 40-storey glass case.

With imagination and desire, things could have turned out differently, but this is more an exercise in real estate development than city-building. In terms of development; it has much to recommend it. In terms of city building; not so much. It takes as much as it gives, and in the 21st century, that’s not enough.

Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author:  Christopher Hume