“I was lucky enough to visit Duisburg-Nord, and I was just blown away by the place,” says Brick Works lead architect Joe Lobko, a partner at du Toit Allsopp Hillier, the architecture firm responsible for the project. “The contrast between everything you imagined had been there once upon a time and what it is now, green and silent, was very poetic. There’s a sense of nature coming back in and reintegrating with this industrial environment.”
Lobko’s visit influenced many elements of the Brick Works project. For starters, much of the original machinery will remain in place. “There are these giant machines that were used to crush the shale, and then the dust from that process was captured in another machine that is this beautiful creature with arms and legs,” he says, clearly smitten. “It’s still there, along with the giant hoppers and conveyer belts.” Another building, home to two ninety-metre-long kilns originally used to fire bricks, will be restored and turned into an event space. Evergreen’s environmental mission will further translate into a native plant nursery, food gardens, and a farmers’ market. And for adventure-seekers, Outward Bound Canada is planning a rope course and a climbing wall. The site “has a kind of aura and magic,” says Lobko.
A somewhat more audacious proposal came forth in June of this year from Les Klein, a principal of Quadrangle Architects. Klein made headlines when he proposed to furnish Toronto’s much-loathed Gardiner Expressway with a new top deck that would hold a park. The elevated highway is routinely blamed for cutting off downtown neighbourhoods from the waterfront, so the city has been gradually trying to demolish it.
Klein argues that that’s a mistake. When construction began in 1956, the Gardiner “was viewed as a symbol of progress and growth — of Toronto having arrived,” he says. “Over the years, we’ve let it become a symbol of the opposite.” He believes the expressway only appears to be a barrier to the waterfront because its underbelly has grown uninviting after years of neglect. “If you look at it with the eyes of the past and maybe the future, you see that it’s actually a magnificent piece of urban architecture and engineering,” he says. “There are parts of it where you really get a sense of that majesty.”
Klein’s so-called Green Ribbon would add new columns and a second deck about eight metres above the existing roadway. The seven-kilometre-long park would be populated with grasses, trees, cycling lanes and footpaths, and photovoltaic panels and wind generators to power lighting systems. He estimates that his plan would cost $500 million to $600 million for full implementation — significantly less, he points out, than the $1.2-billion to $1.8-billion price tag for destroying the entire Gardiner and replacing it with at-grade and underground roads. When he introduced the proposal at Toronto’s ideaCity conference in June, he received a standing ovation and national media attention. Since then, he has been pitching city councillors and Waterfront Toronto. Decision-makers appear to be taking Klein seriously, and he believes he knows why: “The High Line is really lending some credibility to the Green Ribbon.”
Cities around the world are cluttered with relics, from rusting factories and disused rail lines to abandoned military bases and former dumps. In Canada, the industrial real estate vacancy rate recently rose to 7.4 percent, a figure expected to continue climbing, according to real estate consulting firm CB Richard Ellis. Given the preponderance of raw material and the potential for inventive, economically viable public spaces, the choice to reuse these sites, retaining their original gritty character, would seem to be a logical one. So why, then, haven’t more of these post-industrial parks been popping up across Canada and elsewhere?
For one, most industrial sites are privately owned, and parks are public spaces typically funded by public money, so gaining control of those lands can be difficult. (In the case of the Don Valley Brick Works, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority expropriated the site back in 1987.) Further, city planning and permitting processes are set up to serve very specific functions, and officials may not know how to handle what are still leading-edge proposals, making political intervention important. Many citizens also have safety concerns related to toxins and the general state of decay at the sites. Finally, the equation of “industry” with “eyesore” remains.
As a handful of projects have demonstrated, though, it can be done. High Line designer James Corner believes his project, which was pushed through by a powerful not-for-profit organization that encountered a willing city government, is “a great model for other cities to consider.” Many North American cities “have residues from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries” that they’re not sure how to deal with, he says. “There’s no reason that other cities can’t, through both investment and creative design, create amazing, distinctive, and unique public spaces.”
