ISLAND URBANISM

The Toronto Waterfront is an archipelago waiting to be discovered.

Once sandbars, the Toronto Islands surfaced over the last century to become the largest car-free community in North America.

Once an industrial port, the Toronto Waterfront is evolving into a cluster of islands along Queens Quay, Toronto's urban shore.

Equal parts nature and city, these waterfront islands evoke a unique urbanism predicated on the buoyancy of cultural activity, the vibrancy of public spaces, and the dynamism of transit speeds. With this project, the urban archipelago will be extended, animated, and networked by a strategic system of LOOPS and LILIES.

ISLAND LIFE

LOOPS and LILIES create an entirely new identity for the waterfront—an identity that announces this is where you’re going rather than this is where you are.
 
LOOPS—paved and green—enable island hopping. Queens Quay’s right-of-ways include bike lanes, sidewalks, and a ten meter wide flex-scape along the southern side of the Queens Quay right-of-way. The flex-scape’s lighting, seating, landscape, and events create continuous strands of waterfront life. At strategic intervals, the arbors and walkways of these east-west strands unfurl north and south, connecting the Quay to both the water and the city. The LOOPS’ eddies and tethers have two aims: to create intensified urban pockets, and to connect those pockets to one another, as well as to the existing context.

LILIES — snack shacks, news stands, art spaces, information booths, people watching spots, reading rooms, bike rentals, eco-stations, meeting rooms, catnap zones, wi-fi spots, water exhibits — animate the islands, clustering near the culture buoys, the water’s edge, and other destinations. The small LILIES provide seating, shading, and amenities at a collectively intimate scale along the waterfront. The LILIES seed the waterfront’s activities, catalyzing its dynamic cultural life.
 
LOOPS and LILIES foster identity and exchange across a compact and aerated urbanism comprised of density and emptiness, work and leisure, commerce and public space, evening and daytime, crowds and quiet.

ISLAND CULTURE

Each slip-head is marked by a culture buoy—overlaps of LOOPS and LILIES that tie the islands back to the city and collectively offer a programmatic identity to the waterfront. These culture buoys provide branch venues for city cultural and educational centers: The Royal Ontario Museum, The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Toronto International Film Center, The University of Toronto, and so on. The culture buoys can also be rented as flex-spaces by independent cultural groups or for special events: concerts, exhibitions, lectures, wedding banquets. The eight culture buoys punctuating the slip-heads provide the Waterfront with an iconic identity, frame harbour views, and animate the length of Queens Quay.

ISLAND FORMATION

Islands form over time. Toronto’s Waterfront Islands will develop in two phases. Phase one constructs island incubators at the slip heads, which will, in turn, generate the full build-out of the project.

The first phase includes all eight culture buoys, a continuous hardscape right-of-way along the length of Queens Quay, landscaping in the immediate vicinity of the culture buoys, and a fifteen-percent build-out of the LILIES.
 
The full build-out of the waterfront project will complement phase one with the completion of the flex-scape along the entirety of Queens Quay, the extension of landscape and hardscape LOOPS south to the water and north toward downtown, and the realization of the full LILY build-out, which will activate the overall waterfront and reveal Toronto’s entire urban archipelago.
 
ISLAND TALES

Sparked by culture buoys, the waterfront’s LOOPS and LILIES provide bearings and direction to urban life. They invite you to walk, bike, sit, and watch. They’re green—landscape and arbor—and orange—hardscape and enclosure. They include places to stop, see, snack, play, buy, listen, and learn. They’re cool in the summer and warm in the winter. They look good. They make everything else look great.  They engender activities, landscapes, and buildings. They slip in, around, and among the existing waterfront’s currently illegible composition. They bring to Toronto a world apart that is part of its world: the island urbanism of Toronto’s waterfront archipelago.

 

This project was designed by WASAW, a partnership of WW, Stan Allen and the WASAW Brain Trust. WASAW was one of five finalists selected to participate in this international competition.