The creation of River City

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Changing West Don Lands one building at a time

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The four-structure development known as River City is much more than a multi-story residential initiative. In a sense, the fact that it exists is something of a planning miracle.

It is because of the latter that there was much to celebrate for everyone involved in the project at an event that took place at the end of last month and that was organized to commemorate the completion of the four different buildings.

For David Wex, founder and partner of Urban Capital, it marked the culmination of nearly 15 years of work, and to commemorate that fact, the focal point of the event was the screening of a 20-minute film titled Making of River City. .

Written and produced by José Uribe, architect by profession, Wex, Meg Davis, director of development for Waterfront Toronto, Bruce Kuwabara, the first chairman of the organization’s design committee, and architects Gilles Saucier and Andre Perrotte, discuss how it came about and how it was designed and built.

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They were all responsible for helping to convert a once-abandoned area into residences for more than 1,500 people.

Wex describes River City as an “urban development consisting of roughly 1,000 units in four separate buildings, many of them connected by things like elevated bridges. The site is divided in two by the Don Valley Parkway ramps. It is surrounded on all sides by a solid infrastructure.

“It is surrounded by parks developed by Waterfront Toronto and has green spaces that we have developed ourselves.”

River City 3, in particular, he adds, was “extremely complex in terms of design and the fact that each floor plate is different. It is a different genre, it is a different type of construction. The whole development is so unique for its breath in its size, and also for its architectural ambition. But I think it totally opened the eyes of the city to what is possible in terms of residential development. “

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Plans for what would eventually become a unique new residential community began in 2007 when 18 developers submitted applications to Waterfront Toronto, an organization mandated by three levels of government to transform “2,000 acres of brownfield industrial land on the waterfront into communities. Sustainable Mixed Use and Dynamic Public Spaces “.

In the spring of 2008, it announced that the development team from Urban Capital Property Group and Redquartz had been selected to lead the “first phase development of West Don Lands, Toronto’s first new waterfront neighborhood.”

In the film, Davis describes West Don Lands as an area with “a very long history. It has been an industrial site with tanneries and body shops and distilleries and extremely polluted. It is also in the Don River flood zone. The land remained with nothing happening on it for more than 20 years because no one could figure out how to remedy it and protect it against floods in a profitable way.

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“Our job when we took over Waterfront Toronto was to figure out how to do it. The solution for flood protection was to build a huge earth berm along the site to the banks of the Don River ”.

Wex, meanwhile, says the appeal of the site for him at least was the “incredible challenge” that existed.

“This is probably the most difficult infrastructure anywhere in the city of Toronto, we feel we could really accept that and respond in a positive way, unlike what most developers could do, which is try to ignore it, downplay it. Just pretend it’s not there

“The other interesting thing is that the land itself was totally out of the consciousness of the Torontons. No one knew where it was, and how are we going to basically get people excited about a site that was surrounded by transportation infrastructure? “

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Kuwabara, the founding partner of KPMB Architects, sums up the site this way: “There was an astonishing level of complexity. This was such a difficult site to develop. “

Montreal-based architecture studio Saucier + Perrotte was hired and it was through them that development evolved. A key piece was the internationally acclaimed Phase 3, described by Urban Capital on its website as 29 floors of “randomly stacked cubes” that “liberates Toronto’s condo design from its usual limitations.”

Saucier recalls visiting the site and seeing nothing but a flat wasteland. Without providing inspiration, the goal from the beginning, he says, was to create a “completely new environment.”

Kuwabara notes that “the Don River serves about a million people, when you think of its entire watershed further north. So the embankments on both sides are very vulnerable, ”says Kuwabara.

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“When I look at a project like River City, I see how it fits into the type of hydrology and engineering and embankment strategy for the entire Don River. It is one of the most important rivers that frame the city because Toronto is a city on a Great Lake, and is delimited by the two river systems: the Humber and the Don ”.

By the numbers

–Source: Waterfront Toronto