URBAN TORONTO READERS SELECT BEST BUILDINGS OF 2017
The votes are in! For our fourth annual Year-End Readers' Poll, we invited you to select your favorite projects completed in 2017. Respondents were asked to select three favorite projects in each of 7 categories, from a combined total of almost 70 projects completed last year.
Surprising few people, Bazis Group, Metropia, and Plaza's Exhibit Residences took home the 60-125 metre category by a very wide margin. The Rosario Varacalli-designed condominium tower's shifted and stacked box aesthetic beat out contenders Core Condos and 155 Redpath Condos in the 2nd and 3rd spots.
Urban Toronto
The ROM meets its match in new cross-street condo
Ever since the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) switched its main entrance from Queens Park to Bloor Street West five years ago, the first thing a visitor has seen, when exiting architect Daniel Libeskind's controversial extension of the venerable treasure house, is the McDonald's across Bloor Street West.
It's long been the wrong outlet in the wrong place. The visual punches thrown by Mr. Libeskind's building, the handsome overhauls by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg of the Royal Conservatory next door and the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art around the corner, the establishment of this stretch of Bloor as the most upscale shopping district in Toronto.
I'm happy to report, therefore, that the McDonald's outlet will soon be gone. Designed by Toronto architect Rosario Varacalli for a consortium of developers - Bazis, Metropia and Plazacorp - the 32-storey structure, called Exhibit, is the city's first building to engage in an active architectural dialogue with Mr. Libeskind's flamboyant monument across the street.
While the exterior of Mr. Libeskind's ROM addition is black and grey and metallic, for example, Mr. Varacalli's tower will be sheathed in white fritted glass. The Bloor Street façade of the ROM is all elbows and knees jazzily jutting out from the central volume. Mr. Varacalli expresses his personal futurism by stacking four big multi-storey slabs of architecture, one on top of the other, then smartly rotating each and sliding it sideways off the vertical axis of the composition. Exhibit, then, will totter and twist up into the sky, while the ROM, despite its angular commotion, hugs the ground.
In other words, Mr. Varacalli's building will be a re-interpretation, in light of Mr. Libeskind's various manipulations of space, of the tall-building form in an urban context. Instead of slipping politely into the surrounding city fabric, like a routine modernist skyscraper is supposed to do, Exhibit will stand out, assertively defining the streetscape just as the ROM does.
The Globe and Mail, John Bentley Mais
Varacalli’s 1 Yorkville gives Bloor-Yonge spirit in the sky
The intersection of Bloor and Yonge streets is where downtown Toronto ends and everything else begins. It's the site of the most important nexus in the subway system, and a spot where the city's varied scenarios – from posh shopping to grabbing fast food, from mansions to seedy digs – come together and add up to an image of Hogtown civilization.
The architectural designer of 1 Yorkville is Rosario Varacalli. Like the other tall buildings he is doing around town – E Condominiums at Yonge and Eglinton, Exhibit on Bloor West, and others – this one echoes his dissatisfaction with the monotony that characterizes too many glassy Toronto towers. So far, he has used subtle surface patterns (E Condos) and has even rotated the levels of a building (Exhibit) in order to animate his exteriors.
Toronto has not seen a high-rise exactly like what 1 Yorkville seeks to be, although the problem Mr. Varacalli is trying to solve is as old as the skyscraper itself. Should cladding conceal the modern bones under premodern garments? Or should it boldly celebrate the skyscraper's material and artistic newness?
The plan for 1 Yorkville is Mr. Varacalli's answer to these questions. Here, he opts for fiction over function, for romance over realism – for an architecture of fugitive visual effects, as opposed to one that refers the viewer back to the hard facts of modern science and engineering. He is not the only contemporary architect to take this suggestive approach [...] but he is one of the few in Toronto who is working out his ideas wholly in the midst of the local real estate market.
The Globe and Mail, John Bentley Mais
Q&A with architect Rosario Varacalli
“Rosario Varacalli” is a name synonymous with innovative, transformative, soaring structures – words that aptly describe both his architectural style and the highrises themselves. You’ve heard his name if you’ve been paying attention to Toronto’s architectural landscape, but if the name escapes you then his architecture has certainly made a lasting impression over the past 25 years.
Among his creations, a rising star currently in the works is 1 Yorkville, developed by Bazis and Plaza and named after Toronto’s high-end neighbourhood – a slender, singular tower wrapped in undulating metallic ribbons running from top to bottom, playing shadow and light against each other for an ever-changing, always eye-catching exterior. We chatted with the award-winning architect to get his perspective on this design, and the city around it.
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EXHIBIT RESIDENCES TO GIVE BLOOR STREET A TWIST WITH STRIKING 32-STOREY STACKED CUBE CONDO TOWER
Designed by Rosario Varacalli of Toronto’s r. Varacalli Architect, Exhibit will cut a striking figure with its stacked cube shape, wrap-around windows and fritted-glass balcony panels. But the dramatic design isn’t the only intriguing element of the tower. Since it’s going up next to the Bloor subway line, the tower’s parking area must be built above-ground. Since the parking floors will be situated in Cube One (the bottom cube), residents in the lower tower section will enjoy “the unique convenience of above-ground parking on the same level as their suite,” the Exhibit Residences website notes. For some residents, it might actually be easier to leave the building by car than by foot!
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