By Kim Storey & James Brown

The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC) and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) invited 4 multi-disciplinary teams to enter into an R.F.P. for approaches and ideas for re-thinking the mouth of the Don River through an environmental assessment process.

The requirement for an “image” of the project prompted a three-week comprehensive and descriptive analytical process. Several investigations were completed and catalogued including; precedent studies, the transformation of the Don River though archival mapping and photography, a look at the industrial heritage of the site, as well as photographic studies of the site, both historic and current.

This panel was submitted in the Ontario Association Architects Awards Programme and won an award for “Concept”

This Public Construction re-conceives the mouth of the Don as a public landscape in the form of an Estuary • the landscape is expanded into the adjacent landscape as far as it can • a landscape that reduces the flooding uncertainties of its adjacent precincts and neighbours surrounded and embedded with new public parks all different in their materiality, design and sectional solution to flood control • an inside constructed and continually allowing the natural, informal, and chaotic forces of water along a pathway in which naturalization, functional inhabitation, diversity and divergence can take place • a landscape as an experimental encounter with it’s site, taking responsibility and being a middle rather than an outside • a landscape in which infrastructures of flows are functionally integrated rather than simply passing though, reinterpreted roads go beyond their role as carrier of vehicular traffic • a landscape that recognizes the value of flatness, of large horizon driven spaces, open spaces and position landmarks that make the distances between them interesting • a vision expertly underpinned, persuasive and persistent as a Public Construction