PLANT blog

Architectural Musings. Landscape Reverie. Art & Design Abstraction. Behind the Scenes at PLANT

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Lisa Rapoport to speak at Landscape Ontario conference

Make a green start to 2019 at the Landscape Ontario Congress, the annual trade show and conference for Canada’a horticultural and landscape professionals. It runs January 8 - 10 at the Toronto Congress Centre, and PLANT is proud to be part of it. PLANT partner Lisa Rapoport and Darren Bosch of The Landmark Group are the featured speakers for the 1:15 to 4 pm session on January 10. Lisa’s subject is “Building Communities, One Public Space at a Time.” Referencing PLANT projects ranging from minuscule parklets to major public spaces, she will discuss how social, cultural, ritual and ecological experiences can inform the design of community-building public spaces. (Sign up today and save: December 20 is the last day for early bird pricing!)

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Phase 3 renovations pending at St. Augustine’s Seminary

PLANT has now completed extensive accessibility, washroom and building systems upgrades to many parts St. Augustine’s Seminary, and we are excited to begin planning a new phase of renovations to this Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto heritage complex, which dates from 1913. Phase 3 encompasses lighting upgrades and the installation of air conditioning in the chapel and dining room, as well as washroom additions to residential suites in St. Joseph House, the convent on the site. PLANT Project Architect Patricia Joong recently examined the seminary’s beautiful chapel from an unusual perspective: she climbed into the attic above the barrel vault to gain a better understanding of how to minimize the aesthetic impact of lighting and ventilation improvements on this historic structure.

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A TABIA for Forest Hill Village Streetscape Improvements

On December 4, PLANT’s Phase 1 Implementation of Master Plan Streetscape Improvements in Forest Hill Village won a 2018 TABIA Award. Bestowed annually by the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas, the awards recognize excellence in design and programming initiatives that contribute to the vitality, amenity and distinctiveness of the city’s main-street retail districts. PLANT grouped seats, benches and custom green terrazzo planters to create conversation zones along Spadina Road. The planters, which extend the forms and materials palette of PLANT’s Forest Hill Village North Gateway at Suydam Park out to the adjacent retail district, were designed to do double duty as coffee tables. The latest win brings our TABIA total up to seven awards within the past three years.

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Improving Toronto...streetscape after streetscape

PLANT has enjoyed working with several Toronto BIAs (Business Improvement Areas) on the development of streetscape master plans this year, and this important work for the public is now going public. Within the past three months we have conducted open houses to obtain feedback from area residents on our visions for three main street districts: Beach Village BIA, Riverside BIA, and Danforth Mosaic (”The Danny”) BIA. Here’s an image from the most recent of these: the Danforth Mosaic’s open house, which took place last week. All three streetscape improvement programs encompass art programs and other pedestrian-oriented public realm amenities.

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Heads-up: PLANT installation pending at Lyon Station

With Words as Their Actions, PLANT’s public artwork for Ottawa’s new Confederation Line LRT system, is now fabricated and will soon be installed on the concourse level at Lyon Station. The stainless steel heads in the workshop photo below represent the 31 women who, in 1898, founded the capital city’s first historical association, The Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa (renamed The Historical Society of Ottawa in 1955). The steel silhouettes will be mounted atop a ribbon-like steel screen that has been water jet cut with text – in both of Canada’s official languages – from “Last Days of Bytown,” an account of pre-Confederation Ottawa by Anne Dewar, who was a member of the society in the 1950s. We can’t wait to see the finished piece, but we also like this image of “history” in the making.

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Ronna Bloom and PLANT bring Asphalt Poetry to YouTube

One of PLANT’s most enjoyable collaborations of 2018 was teaming up with poet Ronna Bloom for one of the two Everyone Is King curb lane parklet installations we designed as a complement to the King Street Transit Pilot. For the Asphalt Poetry parklet, we stencilled Ronna’s poem “The City” in foot-high letters onto a 30-metre stretch of urban curb lane. Check out Ronna’’s new YouTube video, in which she talks about her interdisciplinary collaborations with PLANT, a filmmaker, an artist, and others . . . and also explains why, when someone asks her for a poem, she treats it as “an emergency request.”

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Junction Brewery featured in Daily Commercial News

Big thanks to Patricia Williams for a great article on Junction Craft Brewery in today’s Daily Commercial News!

https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2018/11/symes-road-destructor-transformed-brewing-jewel

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Dundas Roncesvalles Peace Garden a Downtown Achievement Award Winner

PLANT’s Dundas Roncesvalles Peace Garden in Toronto has received a Downtown Achievement Award from the International Downtown Association. Based in Washington, DC, IDA is North America’s premier industry organization for Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) and other property-owning or business-owning groups who partner with municipalities to revitalize and sustain downtowns and neighbourhood business districts. In 2018 IDA received a record-breaking number of submissions for its awards program and bestowed Pinnacle Awards, Excellence Awards, and Certificates of Merit across six categories. The winning organizations represent cities in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and South Africa. The Dundas Roncesvalles Peace Garden received an IDA Excellence Award in the Public Space Category.

Working with the Roncesvalles Village BIA and the City of Toronto, PLANT transformed a paved, triangular urban ‘remnant’ – formed by the acute intersection of Dundas Street West and Roncesvalles Avenue – into a gateway parkette and community gathering space that is part of the 1812 Binational Heritage Peace Garden Trail.

The peace garden’s design, which integrates curved benches with local plantings, makes engaging and accommodating use of the compact site. An artist from the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation and a non-Indigenous artist from the Roncesvalles area worked with young people from their communities to create designs reflective of local heritage stories. Incorporated into the paving, these graphics commemorate both the Indigenous history of the area and more than two centuries of unbroken peace and friendship between Canada and the United States.

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Junction’s ACO win is on Archinect

News of Junction Craft Brewing’s Architectural Conservancy Ontario Heritage Award is spreading: check out the post on Archinect about this PLANT project’s win of the Paul Oberman Award for Adaptive Reuse. (We usually lead with a taproom photo of this multifaceted project, but here’s an image by Steven Evans Photography that really captures the functional beauty of Junction’s production area.)

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PLANT’s Margot Shafran is an ASLA Student Award winner!

Congratulations to one of PLANT’s newest team members: on Monday, October 22, Margot Shafran will be in Philadelphia to accept an ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects) Student Award at the ASLA Annual Meeting and Expo. The ASLA describes The One Tree Project, the winning submission by Margot and seven of her Washington University in St. Louis classmates, as “a multidirectional and exhaustive survey of nearly everything one can learn from a single tree.” 

With the pending expansion of the university’s Missouri campus, a historic pin oak allée was targeted for removal. This prompted Margot’s team of landscape architecture, architecture, and fine arts students to collaborate amongst themselves and with a wide range of external partners to analyze ecological and cultural aspects of one of the pin oaks. They then extrapolated this information into the surrounding environment. For example, the team took core samples from the tree’s trunk and used sonic tomography to understand the environmental stresses the tree had survived. The studio shared its findings on a blog and hosted on-site stage performances, lectures, and other events.

Margot earned Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Architecture degrees from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017 and joined PLANT’s team earlier this year. She is now working on the Beach Village BIA Streetscape Master Plan and other public realm improvement initiatives.

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Junction Craft Brewing wins Architectural Conservancy Ontario adaptive reuse award

Several weeks ago, we were delighted to learn that Architectural Conservancy Ontario (ACO) had nominated Junction Craft Brewing’s new home in a former incinerator for a heritage award, and would be hosting its 2018 awards ceremony in this PLANT-renovated venue. The outcome of this October 11 event has left us positively euphoric: Junction Craft Brewing won the Paul Oberman Award for Adaptive Reuse (Corporate). ACO states that this award “recognizes those responsible for projects that highlight and incorporate significant heritage structures in fitting and imaginative ways, thereby conserving them for future use and enjoyment.”

Constructed in 1934 in Toronto’s west-end Stockyards, the building once known as “the Symes Road Destructor” served originally as an incinerator and later as a waste transfer facility, before being decommissioned in 1996. For more than an decade, this massive, elegantly detailed building lapsed into dereliction. It was then acquired by a developer in 2012, and has now been fully renovated.

Junction Craft Brewing’s space, which opened in April 2018, contains a brewery, taproom, retail space, and office space. Designed to do double duty as an events venue, the brewery has hosted gatherings ranging from rock concerts to catered private parties. (It has hosted more than 30 weddings, including the recent nuptials of a PLANT team member.) 

“The redesign and refurbishment of the Symes Road Destructor by Junction Craft Brewing and PLANT Architect Inc.is an impressive example of the adaptive reuse of a venerable heritage building by a business,” ACO states. “Their work retained the stunning Art Deco design and industrial character of the site, while repurposing it for a technically demanding manufacturing system. They have not only saved but revitalized one of the few remaining buildings from the industrial enclave once critical to the Stockyards area of the Junction.”

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East Point Park Bird Sanctuary Pavilions shortlisted for an Architizer A+ Award

We are delighted to have something in common with Japanese super-architect Kengo Kuma. One of his projects and one of ours have been shortlisted – along with entries from Beijing, Tainan, Taiwan, and Chicago – in the Architecture+Metal category of the 2018 Architizer A+ Awards. We won’t hold it against you if you check out Kuma’s Cultural Village at Portland Japanese Garden, but we hope it’s PLANT’s East Point Park Bird Sanctuary Pavilions (shown) that will win your Popular Choice vote. Here’s where to view the Architecture+Metal finalists and cast your ballot! Voting closes July 20.

#architizer

#A+

#eastpoint

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The CSLA sends kudos to Kew

Be sure to check out the Summer 2018 issue of Landscapes | Paysages, the magazine of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects. PLANT’s Kew Gardens Streetscape gets a rave review in the Prologue section of the CSLA’s annual Awards of Excellence issue. The CSLA praises the way we created a new public realm zone by intertwining new and existing elements, and proclaims the detailing and materials “beautiful.” You can download a PDF of the entire issue here – and catch up on outstanding new Canadian landscape design coast to coast.

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York and Rees Street Parks: see the shortlisted concepts online

We are tremendously proud that the team led by PLANT and Mandaworks is shortlisted for the design of Toronto’s York Street Park. Waterfront Toronto has now posted the design concepts by the five York Street Park finalists and the five Rees Street Park finalists here. We would love to hear what you think!

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Azure on the hits, misses and poetry of the King parklets (We’re #1 and #3!)

We are so pleased that Mark Teo, Azure’s Web and Branded Content Editor, chose to feature BOTH of our Everyone is King/King Street Pilot Project parklets in his online article, which was published today. Check out the great coverage of our Face to Face and Asphalt Poetry installations here in Mark’s report!

#everyoneisking

#kingstreetpilotproject

#azure

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Ronna Bloom: Asphalt Poetry’s grounded author, in (and on) her own words

We are delighted that our two Everyone is King parklets on King Street are getting a lot of attention. Someone with a unique perspective on one of them is Ronna Bloom: her poem The City is the basis of our Asphalt Poetry installation on King just west of Brant. Check out what Ronna has to say here on her blog about her words on the street.

#everyoneisking

#parklets

#kingstreettransitpilot

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