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.”
