Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/292860
Fort York Visitor Centre by Martha Uniacke Breen renderings courtesy KeArns MAncini ArcHitects inc. T ucked away under a major elevated traffic artery, between a railway corridor, parking lots and the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, is one of the most important historic sites that Toronto citizens have studiously ignored: Fort York. Given its historic importance and almost pristine authenticity, in marked contrast to other local heritage sites such as Black Creek Pioneer Village, it's remarkable that Fort York has tradition- ally been treated as the poor cousin of the city's tourist attractions, generally overlooked save by school groups and the occasional battle re-enactment society. But Fort York is about to undergo a miraculous transformation, with much of the 43 acres of the original area being rehabilitated and landscaped, and a $17.5-million, 25,000-square-foot visitor's centre and attendant common areas nearing completion on the site. Dating back well before the War of 1812, Fort York still contains a number of the original buildings from its days as a garrison and fort on the shore of Lake Ontario. Its main claim to fame is what is now called the Battle of York on April 27, 1813, when the Americans attacked; soundly defeated the British forces sta- tioned there, and briefly occupied the city. The Fort remained in active service until World War I, when it was used as a training facility for soldiers billeted at Stanley Barracks, now at the foot of the Direct Energy Centre parking lot on the CNE grounds. Construction is nearly complete for the first phase of the project, and the Centre will be open to the public by summer, says museum administrator David O'Hara, though its official opening is scheduled for 2015. When completed, it will serve not only as a museum and orientation facility, but as a community hub for the huge influx of residents who have flooded the neighbourhood over the past few years. It will house orien- tation and admission facilities, "Class A" rotating exhibits, a café, community meeting rooms and offices for museum staff. This last function is particularly important, since administrative offices are currently housed in some of the his- toric buildings themselves, and once they are vacated the buildings will be opened to the public, adding to the appeal of the attraction. The Centre will also eventually fea- ture what's being called an "immer- sion experience," similar to the Royal Ontario Museum's Bat Cave, whereby visitors can walk through an enclosed "time tunnel" that will feature a variety of multimedia elements, climaxing with the massive explosion of the gunpowder magazine during the Battle of York. Given a number of obstacles posed by the Fort's location – ranging from the proximity of the elevated Gardiner Expressway practically right over the site, to the poor quality of the soil for sinking foundations, to the fact that the whole area is archaeologically sen- sitive – finding the right architecture firm for the job was a careful process. After a Canada-wide qualification round and a limited competition, the winning contract went to a joint project between Patkau Architects Inc. of Vancouver and Kearns Mancini Architects Inc. of Toronto. "The greatest challenge was to find a place to put the building. Moving it north of the Gardiner meant encroach- ing on the archaeologically protected Commons, while building under the Gardiner was considered an unac- ceptable long-term location for a new building. In fact, finding a suitable rela- tionship to the Gardiner Expressway structure became one of the great- est design challenges," says Jonathan Kearns, Kearns Mancini principal. "A long, ground-embedded build- ing was proposed to satisfy that scale relationship to the Gardiner, while also not overpowering the low-lying fort structures," explains Kearns. "The lin- ear building acts like an embankment and handles the vertical transition between the lower contemporary urban landscape where one enters, and the historic and archaeological upper land- scape of the fort and commons, where one emerges after being experientially processed through the Visitor Centre." The curvilinear embankment build- ing allowed the mapping of the origi- nal historic shoreline of Lake Ontario from the time when Fort York was con- structed, circa 1800, at the mouth of the harbour. Weathering steel panels were chosen as the primary exterior building material to evoke the historical shore- line as well as other historical layers of the site, such as Toronto's industrial and railway era. "The exact east-west location of the building and the main entrance was established to allow views through a April 2014 /61 Fort York Visitor Centre p60-63_FortYorkVC.indd 61 14-04-03 9:07 AM