This week the team submitted a rezoning application for the southwest corner of Yonge & St. Clair (1 St. Clair Avenue West).

More of the details can be found over here on Urban Toronto, but so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. People seem to appreciate the architecture, the public realm improvements, as well as how we’re proposing to deal with the embodied carbon in the existing building.

Retention of an existing concrete building, and architecture that’s a sensitive counterpoint to the original. This (if built as shown) will be excellent. https://t.co/Svbcq3pLJ5

— Alex Bozikovic (@alexbozikovic) December 16, 2021

The application proposes to retain the existing 12-storey office building and both expand its floorplates to the west and build new residential on top. In the middle is a shared multi-storey amenity space that also performs some pretty cool structural gymnastics courtesy of Stephenson Engineering (see above rendering).

This approach created some interesting design challenges for the team. Typically when you’re adding onto an existing building, you want to do something new and not try and copy/bastardize what’s already there. Oftentimes this means something more contemporary.

The architecture team at Gensler Toronto tried this approach but the podium proportions didn’t feel quite right when we did it. So a decision was made to instead pay homage to the existing building’s architecture, and then kind of reinterpret it by playing with scale and other details.

This way the original building remains architecturally legible, but the entire podium still reads as one and its proportions feel much better. We hope you like it as much as we do.