Pour l’artiste torontois Peter Schafrick, le liquide en mouvement révèle la « vitalité cachée » des objets. Preuve en est sa série « Toys », qui présente des jouets en rotation imbibés de peinture. Les fils de couleurs qui s’en détachent semblent alors être un extension de l’objet amplifiant le mouvement à l’extrême.
Basés à Toronto, les membres de Street Feet ont réalisé une superbe vidéo de skate en se rendant dans la ville de Detroit. Appelée « Free Doom », cette création permet de mettre en images toute une équipe d’amoureux de tricks s’emparer de divers espaces de la ville américaine. A découvrir en vidéo dans la suite.
News: architect Frank Gehry has updated his design for a cluster of three towers in his home city of Toronto.
Planned for King Street West at the centre of Toronto’s entertainment district, the proposed gallery and university complex includes the construction of three 82-86 storey metre skyscrapers, atop an expansive art gallery and a learning centre for OCAD University‘s art history and curatorial courses.
Moving on from the initial design revealed in October 2012, Frank Gehry envisages the three residential towers with layers of ribbon-like cladding, creating curving surfaces and asymmetrical shapes. Despite objections from the city’s planning department, the proposed heights remain unchanged.
The planned demolition of three warehouses and a small theatre to make way for the new buildings also prompted concerns from city officials. In response, Gehry has added a structure of vertical, horizontal and diagonal wooden beams to the base buildings as a reference to the area’s industrial past.
“Toronto has grown to look like every other screwed-up city,” Gehry told the Toronto Star. “We’re searching for that way of expressing old Toronto without copying what they did.”
He continued: “It’s not hard to do a skyscraper; but how do you do one that has some Toronto DNA in it? I lived not far from the site. I remember the warehouses. It was the industrial section where the factories were. But we need to bring a new kind of life down there.”
The project is currently set for completion in 2023.
New York architect Gehry is also working on a memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Washington D.C. and a campus for social network Facebook, which he was recently asked to “tone down” and make “more anonymous”.
The architect’s recently completed buildings include a Maggie’s cancer care centre in Hong Kong and the Signature Center theatre in New York. See more architecture by Frank Gehry.
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for trio of towers in Toronto appeared first on Dezeen.
Canadian interior designers Mason Studio filled a warehouse with luminous clouds as a calming space amid the hustle and bustle of the Toronto Design Offsite Festival last month (+ slideshow).
Behind layers of scrunched-up tissue paper, the installation was filled with motion-sensitive devices that triggered a system of concealed lighting.
As visitors approached, each cloud would start to glow, but when that person walked away the lights would slowly die down.
“The installation was an attempt to pull festival goers out of the commotion and noise that inevitably surround design festivals, to provide a space of tranquil and rest, if even for a fleeting moment,” explains Mason Studio.
Gentle music accompanied the installation, helping to block out the noise from outside.
The Toronto Design Offsite Festival ran from 21 to 27 January as a showcase of the best in Canadian design. Projects on show included a matte steel sink with a polished patch in the centre that provides a mirror.
Clouds have inspired a number of design installations in recent years. Makoto Tanijiri of Suppose Design Office filled an exhibition with clouds back in 2009, while Tokujin Yoshioka filled a showroom with mist in 2011. See more weather-related design on Dezeen.
Photography is by Scott Norsworthy.
Here’s a few words from Mason Studio:
Mason Studio, the Toronto-based interior design firm, created a large series of gentle, cloud-like objects to form a site-specific installation nestled in a side-street warehouse. In part of Toronto Design Offsite Festival ’13, the installation was an attempt to pull festival goers out of the commotion and noise that inevitably surround design festivals, to provide a space of tranquil and rest, if even for a fleeting moment.
Fabricated from large sheets of semi-transparent tissue paper, the warehouse was engulfed with the billowing forms to submerge the visitors in a glow emulating the soft filtration of light by clouds at dusk. The ethereal installation was accompanied by a resonating soundscape, producing a numbing white noise to block any extraneous noises.
The motion-sensitive objects were reactive to the surrounding users and environment. Upon inspection, the forms gently intensified with light; walking away, they reverted back to neutral, leaving a trail of dark.
Soundscape produced by: aftermodernlab
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by Mason Studio appeared first on Dezeen.
This house in Toronto by Drew Mandel Architects features pale grey stone walls and an overhanging top storey (+ slideshow).
Home to a family of four, the two-storey residence sits at the edge of Cedarvale Park, a steeply sloping ravine surrounded by woodland.
Drew Mandel Architects used locally quarried stone blocks in three different sizes to create irregular courses on the building’s exterior. To contrast, zinc clads the cantilevered first floor and richly coloured walnut covers a selection of surfaces inside the house.
“The restrained and limited material palette avoids unnecessary ornamentation in order to focus one’s attention on the site, natural light, and movement through modulated open spaces,” say the architects.
The volume of the house is broken down into modules, which step back and forth on both floors to create two patios at ground floor level and a vegetable garden on the roof.
The architects explain this as a “pushing and pulling” that mediates between the residential context at the front and the woodland area at the rear. “The sculptural expression solves programmatic requirements, maximises views, provides natural light, and enhances the promenade and transition from suburban streetscape to very primal forms of nature,” they add.
A glazed single-storey block at the back contains the living room and offers a view back towards the park.
The overhanging first floor cantilevers out beside it and hovers above an outdoor swimming pool. To support the weight of the cantilever, the architects added a single concrete wall and a series of concealed trusses.
A double-height dining room is positioned at the centre of the house and splits the first floor into two wings. A mezzanine corridor runs between.
Other Canadian houses completed in recent years a house built with concrete bricks in Québec and a timber-clad house on a hillside.
See more architecture in Canada »
Here’s some more information from Drew Mandel Architects:
Cedarvale Ravine House
Toronto, Canada
The Cedarvale Ravine House is a 3350 square feet home for a family of four that is located at the edge of the Toronto Cedarvale Ravine. The ravine system, the most distinctive feature of Toronto’s geography, comprises of extraordinary arteries that flow through the city giving unique access to the wilderness. This infill house sits on a typical mid-town residential neighborhood street, but opens to protected woodlands at the rear of the property. The building mass is formed by pushing and pulling the desired volume across the site. It is further manipulated with void spaces. The sculptural expression solves programmatic requirements, maximises views, provides natural light, and enhances the promenade and transition from suburban streetscape to very primal forms of nature.
The circulation of the house weaves through a modulation of intimate and expansive spaces and courtyards that lead to a glass-enclosed single-storey space at the rear of the property. This is the kitchen and family room, the heart of the house. It also defines the south edge of the courtyard. This volume has been pushed down to one storey in order to permit light to the interior and views out to the ravine. Large expanses of glass dematerialise the monolithic stone building and dissolve boundaries between the interior and exterior.
The building is clad in custom local Ontario stone masonry units. 2″, 3″ and 4″ tall stone courses are laid in an irregular sequence. The random lengths of stone range from 1′-0″ to 4′-0″ and intend to emphasise the horizontal lines of the building.
Above: site plan – click for larger image
At the second floor, a zinc-clad cantilevered superstructure frames views from the inside and gestures to the woodlands. It floats above and beyond the main stone volume and allows the re-naturalised ravine plantings to be brought farther into the site. A lap pool reflects light into the space under the second floor cantilever where a family can enjoy outdoor activities around the pool and barbeque.
Above: ground floor plan
The reaching superstructure is the structural feature of the project. Its one storey high trusses are embedded in walls and are supported on an exposed slender column. Column supports are reduced by diffusing the overturning forces into both the roof and floor diaphragms. A series of space-defining vertical planes and a mass concrete wall are used for lateral resistance. The floating rear volume is complimented by a carport cantilever reaching to the front property line. Its structure is a three-point steel framing system with wood infill, sitting on cantilevered concrete walls.
Above: first floor plan
The private areas located on the second floor feature operable floor-to-ceiling glazing with sliding interior wooden shutters. The system allows one to control sunlight, privacy, air flow, and noise as desired.
Above: long section one – click for larger image
The second floor diverges into two wings separated by a double height dining space and its adjacent open courtyard. This connection space is traversed by a bridge that leads to access to a green roof.
Above: long section two – click for larger image
It contains a vegetable garden for family meals, while insulating the one-storey family room-kitchen below. Both the courtyard and the green roof spaces support the local conservation authority’s interest to have the rear of the property re-naturalised as part of a larger ravine stewardship program. With much of the rear planted, these green spaces provide additional amenity space and more complex and modulated volumes. The ravine is brought to the foreground at the second floor spaces.
Above: elevation – click for larger image
The restrained and limited material palette of stone, walnut, and concrete avoids unnecessary ornamentation in order to focus one’s attention on the site, natural light, and movement through modulated open spaces. The Cedarvale Ravine House provides opportunities to celebrate the everyday rituals of residential life and enhances the slow unfolding experience of a special site.
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by Drew Mandel Architects appeared first on Dezeen.
by Ryan B. Patrick Befitting Toronto’s large size and multicultural makeup, the types of cuisine one might find in the energetic northern metropolis are as diverse as they are flavorful. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the city is home to an impressive range of soul food options—as far as…
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Focus sur le travail « Planet Toronto », le nom de cette très belle vidéo en time-lapse afin de présenter la ville canadienne sous son plus beau jour. Une superbe création signée Ryan Emond sur une musique de Joseph McDonald. L’ensemble est à découvrir en HD dans la suite de l’article.
News: architect Frank Gehry has today unveiled proposals for a major new art gallery and university complex at the centre of Toronto’s entertainment district.
Working alongside David Mirvish, director of production company Mirvish Productions, Gehry has designed three 80-85 metre-high residential towers on the top of the new buildings, which will be located beside the historic Royal Alexandra Theatre on King Street West.
The Mirvish Collection gallery will sit beneath two of the towers and house a collection of abstract art built by David and Audrey Mirvish over a period of 50 years. The neighbouring OCAD University Public Learning Centre for Visual Art, Curatorial Studies and Art History will be positioned beneath the third tower and will accommodate exhibition galleries, seminar rooms, studios and a public lecture theatre.
“It’s especially interesting that this project involves the arts,” said Gehry. “With this project, I wanted to create buildings that were good neighbours to the surrounding buildings and that respected the rich and diverse history of the area.”
Six properties currently located on the site will be preserved and maintained as part of the development, as will the Canada Walk of Fame along King Street West and Simcoe Street, but three warehouses and a small theatre are set to be demolished.
Gehry is also designing the new campus for Facebook, and recently donated $100,000 towards a new annual prize for architecture graduates.
See all our stories about Frank Gehry »
Here’s the full press release from the developers:
David Mirvish and Frank Gehry Unveil Conceptual Design to Transform Toronto’s Entertainment District
Reimagining of King Street Entertainment District Continues Mirvish Family’s Legacy While Supporting Toronto’s Thriving Cultural Corridor
Major Cultural Additions to the District Include the Mirvish Collection, a 60,000-Square-Foot Gallery Dedicated to Abstract Art, and OCAD University Facility
David Mirvish, founder of Mirvish Productions, and world-renowned architect Frank Gehry today unveiled the conceptual design for a mixed-use project that will transform Toronto’s downtown arts and entertainment district and advance the area’s future as a thriving cultural centre. The multi-year, multi-phase project is the largest and most significant urban commission to date for the Toronto-born architect, bringing new cultural, residential and retail spaces to a site immediately next to the Royal Alexandra Theatre and creating a new visual identity for the city’s premier arts district.
The Mirvish/Gehry project is the vision of David Mirvish, who through his family’s support of the arts has helped make the city a major international centre for performing arts and has transformed the downtown King Street Entertainment District. Bordered by many of Toronto’s leading cultural institutions including the Royal Alexandra Theatre and Roy Thomson Hall to the east, the Toronto International Film Festival Bell Lightbox to the west, and the John Street Cultural Corridor to the west culminating at the Art Gallery of Ontario to the north, the project will have at its centre the new Mirvish Collection museum and a new facility for OCAD University.
Frank Gehry, whose other major Canadian project is the redesigned Art Gallery of Ontario (2008), grew up in the King Street West neighbourhood, and his design relates directly to the scale, materials and feeling of the area. “We see an opportunity to join our history with Frank Gehry’s history and continue our ongoing commitment to the neighbourhood,” said David Mirvish. “This area was transformed 50 years ago after my father purchased the Royal Alexandra Theatre, and this project will continue the theatre’s future and transform the neighbourhood again for the next 50 years. I am proud that we can continue this legacy that my father began.”
“It is very special for me to be able to work in Toronto where I was born and to engage the neighbourhoods where I grew up,” said Gehry. “It’s especially interesting that this project involves the arts. That is always meaningful to me. With this project, I wanted to create buildings that were good neighbours to the surrounding buildings and that respected the rich and diverse history of the area. I also wanted to make nice places for the people who live in and visit the buildings. David has an exciting vision, and I am thrilled to be a part of it.”
The Mirvish/Gehry design will create a new profile for the arts and entertainment district at the streetscape and in the skyline, add significantly to the John Street Cultural Corridor, and provide new and enhanced public spaces. The site includes the north side of King Street West and the south side of Pearl Street, occupying the entire block between John Street and Ed Mirvish Way and a portion of the block between Ed Mirvish Way and the Royal Alexandra Theatre, and consists of six properties owned by the Mirvish family. The Canada Walk of Fame, located along King West and Simcoe Streets, will be preserved and maintained. The project’s development, management and construction will be led by Peter Kofman of Projectcore Inc. in conjunction with David Mirvish.
The conceptual design, which will continue to evolve, consists of two six-story stepped podiums, which relate in scale and articulation to the neighbouring buildings, topped by three iconic residential towers, ranging in size from 80 to 85 storeys. Each tower has a complementary but distinctive design, which fits with the history and texture of the surrounding neighbourhood. The trio of towers works together to form a dynamic still life on the skyline. The west block of the plan, oriented to King Street West, features a stepped podium with the Mirvish Collection in the atrium and planted terraces that create a green silhouette overlooking King Street and Metro Square. The east block of the plan includes the preservation of the Royal Alexandra Theatre and another stepped podium housing the OCAD University facility that fronts onto King Street West.
The new 60,000-square-foot Mirvish Collection will be a destination for viewing contemporary abstract art from the exemplary collection of Audrey and David Mirvish. The collection was built over 50 years, beginning when David Mirvish ran a globally recognized art gallery in Toronto from 1963-1978. The Mirvish Collection comprises works by leading artists including Jack Bush, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, David Smith and Frank Stella. The nonprofit Mirvish Collection, which will be free and open to the public, will present curated artist-focused exhibitions that leverage the depth of the Mirvish holdings and will be available to other institutions. It will also host traveling exhibitions.
The project incorporates a new multi-floor facility for the OCAD University Public Learning Centre for Visual Art, Curatorial Studies and Art History, including exhibition galleries, studios, seminar rooms, and a public lecture hall. The galleries will feature curatorial programming drawn from OCAD University faculty, the OCAD University Art Collection, the OCAD University Archives and the Printmaking and Publications Research and Production Centre. “Urban universities such as OCAD University contribute to and benefit from their situation within a creative city,” said Dr. Sara Diamond, OCAD University President andflivbrary Vice-Chancellor. “We are a hub for art, design, media, research, innovation and the business of creativity, and this new facility, in the heart of a transforming cultural district, is a perfect setting for OCAD University.”
As part of the plan, the Princess of Wales Theatre, owned and operated by Mirvish Productions, will be replaced along with adjacent warehouses. The artist Frank Stella, whose commissioned murals are part of the Princess of Wales Theatre, will partner with Frank Gehry to develop new work for the project, integrating art and architecture. “The Princess of Wales Theatre is a wonderful space to experience theatre, but the next step for the future of this neighbourhood is providing new kinds of cultural spaces,” said David Mirvish. “We are dedicated to providing more theatre in Toronto, not less, and through our other theatres, we will continue to provide world-class theatre experiences.”
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Toronto’s entertainment district appeared first on Dezeen.
Young architects seek to shake up design norms from Mecca to your living room
Alex Josephson, Pooya Baktash and their fellow architects at Toronto-based Partisans are engaging in architectural guerrilla warfare. They want your attention and, most likely, they’ll get it as they poke, prod, shock and awe you into changing the way you see the world, or at least its buildings.
“Everyone at Partisans is young. The average age is 26,” says Josephson. “The idea was to graduate and immediately start working, to be free and experiment and research and try to figure out a way to make that viable as a business.” Part of that experimentation involves seeing how far they can push their industry, with proposed projects like their New Mecca Masterplan, for which they were recently awarded the 2012 People’s Choice Award for unrealized projects by Azure magazine.
They came up with their vision for a new Mecca in response to the actual commission to redesign the holy city’s center, which was awarded to Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster (and 18 other architects) by the Saudi royal family.
Partisan’s plan replaces the Kaaba—a building at the center of the Masjid al Haram (the Grand Mosque) in Mecca and the holiest site in Islam; it is towards the Kabaa that Muslims face when they pray and a tenet of the religion that a pilgrimage to the site must be undertaken at least once in a lifetime—with a void, an absence of architecture. “As a counterpoint, we realized the most interesting place to imagine redesigning is the mosque itself. All these other projects stop there and build these grotesque buildings around the mosque,” says Josephson.
Partisans sees the parameters of the official competition as misguided, and critiques the winning plan that puts such emphasis on “huge buildings, luxury hotels and giant entrances—the things architects like to build,” says Josephson. Partisan’s proposal questions why the Saudis couldn’t do better to honor the creativity of their ancestors. “This is just bling,” he says, pointing to the Abraj-al-Bait Towers, a clocktower, giant 5-star hotel and shopping center that was completed in 2012 as the first part of Mecca’s redesign.
Projects like the Mecca redesign are indicative of the challenges Josephson and Baktash would like to present to the industry—as conceptualized by the rag-tag, energetic and diverse band of architects they’ve assembled under Partisan’s roof. “I imagined creating a practice with people of different backgrounds, of different disciplines,” says Josephson. “In-house we have a writer, musician, innovation and business strategist; we’re Hindu, Jews, Christians, Muslims and Atheists. We’re Iranian, Canadian, Slovakian, Indian, American. The idea was to bring these people together with disparate interests and professions to establish a new language of design.”
“The point is that it’s not perfect,” he goes on to say. “And the point is to challenge, the consumer first, and then the establishment. We’re interested in politics. We’re interested in the masses.”
That isn’t to say that every Partisans project has to take on issues as significant or controversial as the center of the universe for the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. They’re also bringing the fight to places like Pottery Barn with items like Tufftit, their take on the tufted leather bench where the soft leather is replaced with sculpted wood.
“Ninety percent of the world doesn’t buy into the idea of modern design, or contemporary design. People are conservative. Tufftit feeds off of that,” says Josephson. “We wanted to design furniture. People want tufted leather. We can we explore that language in a way that reinvents it, that is contemporary, that is perhaps futurist.” Also, it doesn’t look half bad.
Partisans currently has several projects in process that can be previewed on the firm’s website.
Our interview with the Toronto-based artist on the process and progress of his photocopy tapestries
Niall McClelland‘s art may be rooted in the subcultures of graffiti and punk rock, but its roughness has been refined through a well executed artistic process. His highly sought after “Tapestry” series includes large-scale works which are made by folding and wearing down large sheets of paper covered in photocopy toner. Toying with balance between control and chance, McClelland also makes vivid prints by allowing inkjet cartridges to seep into the corners of rugged Japanese papers that have been folded and bound, leaving striking psychedelic stains.
We recently caught up with the Toronto-based artist to ask about his process and his upcoming projects.
It developed as a practical way of making work. I needed to use affordable material for budget reasons, but it’s also what I’ve been surrounded by forever—used clothes, used furniture, thrift shop or junk pile everything. It seems like a natural, honest starting point for me to make work. Developing an eye for the potential in trash or cheap familiar materials. Being resourceful I think is the appeal, there’s a pride that comes from that.
I like the idea of working with material that has had a bit of life to it, something that has existed outside of a studio. I tend to set up scenarios for the work to be created within, so setting up parameters that I’ve pre-determined then letting the material do its own thing within them—anything from weathering canvases on my roof, to folding paper and walking with it in my pocket. As far as when to know when to let go, that’s just experience with the materials and learning restraint. Having an eye for what works and what is shit.
Jeremy saw my show last spring at Clint Roenisch gallery and got in touch, but we have a lot of friends in common so it wasn’t a huge stretch. We started getting together to talk about his upcoming collection and compare notes, he’s a sharp guy and we see eye to eye on things, so we just narrowed it down to several directions and I created the work which ended up as his prints for the Spring/Summer 2012 collection. Super simple, we’re friends now. I also have a couple really rad silk scarves coming out with Cast of Vices in the fall. We scanned some of the folded photocopies on this insane NASA scanner, and had them printed on really great silk, pretty badass.
As far as upcoming projects, I have a solo show opening at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco opening 7 April. I’ll be showing with Clint Roenisch at the NADA fair in May (to coincide with the first Frieze Art Fair in New York) alongside buds and great artists Hugh Scott-Douglas and Alexander Hardashnakov, which should be rad. All three of us will also be included in the group exhibit this June “Trans/FORM” at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) in Toronto alongside five other artists. Can’t wait for that one too!
Niall McClelland is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto, Envoy Enterprises in New York and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco.
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