Rising up: Higher condos let architects get creative
Patrick Langston, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: March 27, 2015, Last Updated: March 27, 2015 8:00 AM EDT
Claridge’s Icon illustrates some of the ideas being explored in Toronto says its designer. Viewed from Dow’s Lake, there’s a sense of movement.
With excavation now underway at Carling Avenue and Preston Street, Claridge Homes is that much closer to presenting Ottawa with its tallest residential tower: the 45-storey, 128-metre Icon. Of course, the 320–unit condominium won’t stay the tallest forever, not with city council having approved Richcraft Homes’ The Sky, a trio of towers in the same area that will eventually soar to 18, 45 and 55 floors.
And count on it: with condos like Toronto’s The One proposed to rocket 80 floors high, sooner or later someone here will proclaim, “Mine is bigger” and we’ll be craning our necks to gaze upward at 60, 70 or more storeys.
Neighbours may hate these towers for the shadows and swelling populations they bring, but many architects love them for the challenges and creative opportunities their size and prominence offer.
Icon, for example, illustrates some of the ideas being explored in Toronto, says David Pontarini of that city’s Hariri Pontarini Architects, which designed Icon. For example, the “outer edges of these tall buildings, which are typically balconies, can be a lot more sculptural than they traditionally have been; the elevations like the one facing Dow’s Lake can be more fluid.”
While its south side has a sensuous movement, the north-facing side of Claridge’s Icon is more rigid and sober in keeping with the urban landscape it fronts.
Viewed from the lake, the shifting series of doubled-up balconies bring a sensuous movement to a building that could have been yawningly static. They also suggest a reed or long piece of grass — just what you’d find around the lake and its extensive parkland — as well as hinting at musculature to give the building a feeling of strength and self-confidence.
By contrast, the north-facing side of the building is more rigid and sober in keeping with the urban landscape it fronts.
The first condos here and elsewhere tended to the utilitarian in design, says George Dark a Toronto-based planning and urban design consultant who has worked with the City of Ottawa on its plans for key areas like Little Italy. Now, he says, some of the best architects around are turning their talents to these buildings.
While neither is a skyscraper, he points to buildings like Charlesfort’s Art Deco-themed condos Hudson Park and The Merit, both designed by architect Barry Hobin, as examples: “You can’t suggest that Barry Hobin hasn’t laboured over the design.”
Urban planner George Dark points to the Art Deco-themed The Merit by Charlesfort Development as an earlier example of Ottawa buildings that are attracting top architectural talent.
As buildings get taller, he says, their architecture becomes more playful — a good description of the whimsical element in the Dow’s Lake side of Icon.
Ever-taller buildings are also becoming an increasingly interesting mix of retail and office space at the lower levels and residences above, says Dark. Icon, for example, will feature a glassed podium with a restaurant on the main floor, Claridge’s new offices above and then the residential tower. Think of it as a vertical spin on traditional main streets with their ground-level businesses topped by apartments.
Ever-taller buildings are also becoming an increasingly interesting mix of retail and office space at the lower levels and residences above, says Dark. Icon will feature a glassed podium with a restaurant on the main floor and Claridge’s new offices above.
Dark also notes the increasing seriousness with which the City of Ottawa is taking design. For example, when reviewing high-profile building proposals, the city’s Urban Design Review Panel, which assesses the proposals for attractiveness and functionality, sometimes calls in outside experts such as architects Josh Chaiken from New York and Chicago’s Gordon Gill.
In fact, Claridge scouted architects in both the United States and Canada before signing on Hariri Pontarini Architects. That search included discussions with Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based Frank Gehry, the architect of internationally renowned buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
“The city wanted world-class architecture because (the location) is the gateway to that part of the city,” says Claridge vice-president Shawn Malhotra. “As we’re getting more height and more sophisticated, we’re going with more sophisticated architects.”
(Not that we’re even in the running for really tall buildings. When it’s completed a few years down the road, Saudi Arabia’s needle-nosed Kingdom Tower will jut one kilometre into the sky. That’s the equivalent of almost eight Icons.)
‘You can’t suggest that (architect) Barry Hobin hasn’t laboured over the design,’ urban planner George Dark says of Hudson Park.
Malhotra says today’s buyers also demand that buildings respond more to their expectations. In the case of Icon, for example, the original design called for more fritted or frosted glass on the balconies. But buyers didn’t like how that would cut down their view, especially from inside their units, so Claridge swapped some of the fritted for clear glass.
If Icon’s skyward direction prompted whimsical touches, the shortening of Mastercraft Starwood’s SoHo Italia meant it got more serious. Expected to launch this summer, the building on Preston near Carling was originally intended to be 35 storeys, and that inspired Ottawa architect Rod Lahey, an admirer of Chicago’s stunningly organic 80-storey Aqua tower, to design long, wavy balconies as a tribute to Dow’s Lake.
But when pushback from the city meant SoHo Italia was reduced to 30 storeys with greater setback, some of the original drama of that wavy design was lost.
If Icon’s skyward direction prompted whimsical touches, the shortening of Mastercraft Starwood’s SoHo Italia meant it got more serious. ‘We got wrapped up in the idea of the black Italian suit,’ says architect Rod Lahey. ‘We’ve gone to clean, slick black aluminum and floor-to-ceiling glass.’
With the ode to water off the table, says Lahey, “we got wrapped up in the idea of the black Italian suit, the sleekness of an Italian car. We’ve gone to clean, slick black aluminum and floor-to-ceiling glass.”
The result is a building with etched lines and sharp corners. The glassy podium is articulated with deeply recessed windows while a handful of projecting balconies near the building’s crown add interesting animation and detail.
Lahey has also designed 121 Parkdale north of Wellington Street for Brigil Construction. To the west is the institutional Tunney’s Pasture and to the east the traditionally working class neighbourhood of Mechanicsville. Responding to both neighbours, Lahey has blended brick, stone and curved glass in the 32-storey building.
Responding to its neighbours — Tunney’s Pasture to the west and Mechanicsville to the east — 121 Parkdale blends brick, stone and curved glass in the 32-storey building.
However, when it comes to height, the building makes no bones about its stature.
“You’re better off to celebrate height,” says Lahey. “Today with towers, the first three or four levels are becoming more responsive to the street. After that, celebrate the tower. In New York, you never get the sense of height because there’s so much coming at you from the street level.”
Richcraft’s The Sky promises plenty of street-level action with its public plaza, underground access from the tallest building to the O-Train, and lower-level retail space.
Like Icon, the tall towers especially respond to their mixed natural/urban environment.
“Our premise was to maintain organic shapes (to the south) because of Dow’s Lake, the parkland, so we tried to respond in a natural way by having a curvilinear shape,” architect Enzo Corazza of Toronto’s Graziani Corazza Architects says of the project’s two taller buildings. To the north, the buildings are more “rectilinear” as is the shorter, and therefore less attention-grabbing, 18-storey tower.
Richcraft’s The Sky features a ‘curvilinear shape’ towards Dow’s Lake but straighter lines to the north in keeping with its surroundings, says architect Enzo Corazza.
By shading the buildings, those soft, wraparound balconies facing the lake will also help reduce solar gain in the summer, a problem with some heavily glazed towers, according to Dark.
As to those offset sections in the two taller towers, they’re meant to provide visual interest while the strong horizontals help define the shape of the building.
In designing The Sky, Corazza says he was “not at all” influenced by Ottawa’s architecturally conservative reputation. Rather, he imported bold, simple architectural ideas from other, bigger centres so that from a distance the buildings become iconic.
“This is a district of transition, the whole Carling and Preston area, so we saw this as the western gateway into that district.”
Gems like Parliament Hill and some others aside, Ottawa has been considered banal building central. Thank the spill-over effect of boring, penny-pinching federal office buildings for that, says Lahey. But with this new generation of condos, he sees change coming.
“Are we going to be Shanghai? No. New York? No. But I think we’re seeing a rebirth (of architecture) in the city.”
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