King Toronto Condos is a New Condo development by Westbank Corp& Allied Properties REIT , located at Spadina Ave & King St W, Toronto.
Living On A Mountaintop
KING TORONTO’S TOPOGRAPHICAL ROOFSCAPE FORMS FOUR MOUNTAINS ORIENTED TOWARDS THE NORTH, SOUTH, WEST AND EAST ABOVE A CENTRAL COURTYARD.
Amenities
Catering Kitchen, Concierge, Court, Courtyard, Cycle-Friendly, Fitness, Games Room, Garden, Lounge, Parking, Playground, Storage, Terrace
Design Concept— Bjarke Ingels Founder, BIG
Urban development is an ongoing conversation across time and place. In our time, and in King West, our team at BIG engaged with Westbank and Allied on three questions, and our ultimate design was informed by three observations.
The questions first: What kind of a neighbourhood was this before? What has it become now? And where is it going in the future? The observations — and the resulting design — were rooted in the understanding that we gleaned from this inquiry.
The first observation was that King West is a unique space in the Toronto context, characterized by an informal urban network of alleys, back lots and secret gardens. The neighbourhood’s historic and gradual transformation from urban manufacturing into a vibrant creative neighbourhood had generated a stark variation in scale and activity. We wanted to enhance and expand that architectural diversity, imagining a city block that would expand and contract, ascend and descend. We wanted to honour the neighbourhood context by maintaining and creating alleys, short cuts and underpasses gaps and cracks for all kinds of urban life.
Second, new urban development seems to tirelessly repeat the same limited range of typologies. In Toronto of late, the tower-on-a-podium seems to be the one size that fits all. Yet Canada has a rich and previously untapped history of urban innovation. Specifically, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 in Montreal exploded the monolithic box to create a porous landscape of houses with gardens.
We asked ourselves if we could imagine an urban-integrated equivalent of Safdie’s Habitat, half a century later. In this revision, the streetwall is broken and rotated. The monolithic volume of the tower-on-podium is chipped away to create an undulating landscape of terraces. The urban silhouette rises towards the sky or dips down to touch the ground. And at every shift, an urban garden is created, allowing residents access to fresh air and greenery. Each terrace has a tree, so you have both an alpine skyline of individual urban ledges and a forest, rooted in a courtyard that connects the street to a lush, green park.
The third observation, and our third response, was to recognize and acknowledge the dominant materiality of the neighbourhood’s red and yellow brick warehouses. We tried a red brick. A yellow brick. A cement brick. And finally, we rediscovered the glass brick. The glass brick can be transparent, translucent and opaque. It can admit light while protecting privacy. It can sparkle and refract in the daylight and glow from within at night. The lightness and luminosity of the glass brick provides the urban mountain range with the glacial lightness of an iceberg.
The result is the new architectural character of KING Toronto – inspired by the past, informed by the present and aspiring towards the future.
Manifesto— Ian Gillespie Founder, Westbank
When our partner Michael Emory at Allied reached out and asked us to look at the nearly 600 feet of frontage he had assembled over 10 years on King Street W in Toronto, it immediately struck us that this site deserved something extraordinary. To design the project, Bjarke Ingels and his team at BIG came first to mind, as we had been looking for an opportunity to work together in Toronto for some time. Allied was equally enthusiastic about that starting point.
I always had a fascination with Habitat 67, well before I was actually able to see it in person. I think it began with my interest in the ideals behind the kibbutz and building a community. We thought of this project as a way to demonstrate how architecture can meet this challenge and, hopefully, on completion, that will be its test: can architecture bring people together? In many respects, I think the project has the potential to be more successful than Habitat 67, which after all, was an experiment built on an island in the middle of a river. Here, we have the opportunity to infill within an already vibrant, successful neighbourhood. King West is one of Canada’s truly great neighbourhoods. Walkable, interspersed with parks and amenities, enjoying access to transit and a unique character made up of an eclectic mix of heritage and a fine-grain typology. At a different scale, using a variety of ways to extend nature, we have managed to create a village green at the heart of our project and in the surrounding landscape.
The other interesting aspect of this project is the inspiration from Maison de Verre, in Paris, which led us to explore the use of glass block both on the building façade and within the project, playing with reflectivity, translucency and transparency to create a luminescent project that changes with the light. Building upon the success of Vancouver House and our adoption of the principal of Gesamtkunstwerk, we have once again taken up the challenge of creating the total work of art. It was through Vancouver House, our first project with Bjarke Ingels, that I first discovered the word and philosophy behind Gesamtkunstwerk, and embraced it as a guiding philosophy for all of our projects, current and future. We realized that, above all, our work expresses the integration of art and architecture, which we hope will elevate our projects to become living sculptures and total works of art. Today, this concept continues to manifest itself in our projects in new and interesting ways, no better than here with what we are calling KING Toronto.
We are also really excited about the chance to work with Public Work, the young, talented landscape architect who has stepped up to meet the challenge of bringing nature into the urban environment. I think the landscape design on this project may be the best in the country. Finally, KING Toronto is also a project that is resonating strongly within the public discourse. We will be putting on our next exhibition onsite in Toronto, within our BIG-designed 2016 Serpentine Pavilion called Unzipped. This project and this conversation are among the ways we are helping contribute to a dialogue around urbanism and the opportunities of using architecture to create community in Toronto, a wonderful city that is considered amongst the most vibrant in the world today.
Four mountains in Toronto for the first time, ever.
”Habitat 2.0, 50 years after Moshe Safdie, at King Street West, Toronto”
Westbank is a practice dedicated to the creation of beauty, in all forms and in the broadest definition. As we have grown the category of a developer has become too narrow to contain the essence of our practice. We are not motivated by the same things as a developer, our values are different: we invite collaborations with cultural pioneers, showcasing their work and allowing it to inform and influence our projects. We strive to develop relationships with creatives so that we function as patrons of their art, rather than as consumers of artistic services. We embrace our eclectic nature, broadening our interests and seeking out willing collaborators in art, culture, music, fashion, technology, sustainability, and architecture, while taking on projects at every scale, from the micro to the macro level. We are and have always been a practice seeking to make meaningful contributions to the cities in which we work and we see the creation of beauty as the means to this end. Through these and other endeavors, we have come to realize that too often, beauty is mistaken as a luxury, an option or an accessory, when we have never seen it as anything less than essential. Recognizing this, we have taken it upon ourselves to fight for it; to create it, to foster it and to celebrate it. In committing our efforts fully to this end, we have evolved beyond the definition of a real estate development firm, to become a culture company.
Allied operates first and foremost on the principle that real estate is a profoundly human business. Our properties are run by people for people, and we’ve built our portfolio to better serve the people who use our buildings. In 2003, we went public for the express purpose of consolidating high- quality workspace, enabling us to become a leading owner, manager and developer of urban office properties in Canada. Our commitment to distinctive urban workspace is founded on a clear value proposition: well- designed, centrally located, distinctive and cost-effective workspace that adds value, socially, culturally and economically, for our users and for the communities and the cities in which our buildings operate. We believe that each building represents an investment in the community and recognize that the strength of a neighbourhood, as well as the performance of buildings within it, are inextricably linked. Allied is also a product of its history and its business environment. Increasingly, the single most important element of our business environment is urban intensification. Canadians are living and working downtown in greater numbers than ever before. The future of Allied is in the future of urban workspace. It involves the continued consolidation and mixed-use intensification of distinctive urban office properties, sensitivity to design and collaboration, each of which are integral to our success and also add value – economically, socially and culturally. We are committed to creating urban office environments that enrich experience and support the success of our tenants, while contributing vitality to the urban fabric of our cities.
BIG is a Copenhagen, New York and London based group of architects, designers, urbanists, landscape professionals, interior and product designers, researchers and inventors. The office is currently involved in a large number of projects throughout Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. Not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economical flows and communication technologies that all together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. BIG believes that in order to deal with today’s challenges, architecture can profitably move into a field that has been largely unexplored. A pragmatic utopian architecture that steers clear of the petrifying pragmatism of boring boxes and the naïve utopian ideas of digital formalism. Like a form of programmatic alchemy, we create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. By hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatic and utopia, we architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our planet, to better fit contemporary life forms.
Bjarke Ingels
Bjarke Ingels founded BIG Bjarke Ingels Group in 2005 after co-founding PLOT Architects in 2001 and working at OMA in Rotterdam. Bjarke defines architecture as the art and science of making sure our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives. Through careful analysis of various parameters from local culture and climate, ever changing patters of contemporary life, to the ebbs and flows of the global economy, Bjarke believes in the idea of information-driven-design as the driving force for his design process. Named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME Magazine in 2016, Bjarke has designed and completed award-winning buildings globally.
In 2011, Wall Street Journal named Bjarke the Innovator of the Year; he received the Danish Crown Prince’s Culture Prize in 2011; the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2004; and the ULI Award for Excellence in 2009. Alongside his architectural practice, Bjarke has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, and Rice University and is an honorary professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen. He is a frequent public speaker and continues to hold lectures in venues such as TED, WIRED, AMCHAM, 10 Downing Street, the World Economic Forum and many more. In 2018, Bjarke was named Chief Architectural Advisor by WeWork to advise and develop the firm’s design vision and language for buildings, campuses and neighbourhoods globally.
Toronto
