In the mid-20th century, Steen Eiler Rasmussen worked as an urban planner and urban theorist in his native Copenhagen. In that work, and in his anthropocentric book Experiencing Architecture, Rasmussen likened the growth of Copenhagen to five branches extending out into the landscape like the fingers of one hand separated by interstitial stretches of nature.
In Canada now many decades later, the once provincial city of Toronto has metastasized into a metropolis, extending across great swathes of terrain as a seemingly limitless city north of Lake Ontario, with freeways and convenience stores reminiscent of those in the United States and ad hoc skyscrapers reminiscent perhaps of certain sculptural high-rises in contemporary China.
This blunt prospect of Canada’s business capital is mitigated, however, by the many gulleys or ravines that weave their way through the morphing topography, almost as the inverse of Rasmussen’s diagram. Toronto might yet, in this reading of nature as a living structure, densify about long tentacles of vegetation and water and wildlife, linking the vast outer reaches of continental Canada with the urban ambitions of this comparatively new metropolis.
This reading of the city as a terrain of living systems is neither simplistic nor picturesque; it suggests an urban strategy that facilitates recreation, sustainability, and health. Conversely, it implores new construction in this bigger ecology (an ecology bigger than any single building) to respect, learn from, and augment that which has existed long before – and will, with work, continue long after – our current civilization.
This is the geographical and philosophical context for the new headquarters of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) designed by Dublin-based Bucholz McEvoy Architects with Toronto practice ZAS Architects, and climatic engineers Transsolar.
The new structure...
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