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J UNE 2015 | 61 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games Athletes' Village / Canary District PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM ARBAN PHOTGRAPHY INC./COURTESY KRISS COMMUNICATIONS 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games Athletes' Village / Canary District by YVAN MARSTON T he days leading up to Toronto's 2015 Pan Am/Parapan American Games are filled with the avid enthusiasm to which every host city falls prey. In the fever pace to design and build hous- ing for the event's 10,000 athletes and officials, it is easy to forget that the first phase and the first occupants in one of the largest developments in the city's history will be there for little more than four weeks. "Once the games are over, people aren't going to say they live in the Pan Am Village. They'll say they live in the Canary District. The legacy is that there will be a fully integrated residen- tial community," says architect Bruce Kuwabara, whose firm KPMB Architects ( K PMB) wa s t apped, a long w it h Peter Clewes's architectsAlliance (aA), Daoust Lestage Inc. and MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects (MJMA) to form the Dundee Kilmer Integrated Design Team that has designed Toronto's newest neighbourhood. In Games mode, the Village will spend the summer hosting a population of ath- letes three times greater than that of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games. And in the fall, crews will assemble again to convert the spaces to make a vibrant and sustainable community for nearly 4,000 people. The mixed-income area will include student housing, affordable housing, condominiums and a YMCA. It was a big project with an ambitious timeline that called for significant design resources. And the architects recognized the importance of bringing different sensi- bilities to the project if they were going to build something interesting. Something Kuwabara expressed throughout the proj- ect as a "cohesive diversity." "We're building a neighbourhood all in one shot, so the normal irregularities that come from zoning changes, mate- rials, the built form, they don't have the time to occur," explains Jason Lester, president of Dundee Kilmer, the devel- opment partnership formed by Dundee Realty and Kilmer Van Nostrand that was awarded the project. K PMB and a A st ruck an inte- grated design team that also included Montreal's Daoust Lestage Inc. and Toronto's MJMA. Each taking a differ- ent development block (KPMB worked on two blocks), the firms created the designs for the six buildings that would form enough housing and support for the initial wave of 7,100 athletes and officials, as well as for the next users, some 3,200 Parapan Am Games athletes who will compete in August. As a design build, the speed at which the buildings were being imagined required the additional support of a veteran place-maker: Page + Steele/ IBI Group was brought in to complete the production work on all the buildings. In all, the job entailed the devel- opment of eight city blocks including underlying infrastructure, the six build- ings as well as the restoration and reno- vation of the CNR heritage building and the Canary restaurant building (from which the district gets its name). Working with Waterfront Toronto's master plan, a block plan was devel- oped under a prior planning and design compliance process and the architects worked together to create a new model for healthy, sustainable and accessible urban living. And they did so using a common language of materials, mass- ing and forms. The buildings that form the project's Games phase share a material palette that evolves – from brick, stone and wood on lower floors to echo the indus- trial language of the adjacent Distillery District, to upper strata of glass and steel, a nod to the future of the community. Tying these together is a frame- work of courtyards, mews, pathways and broad public thoroughfares. Some, like the raised courtyard in KPMB's condominium complex at Front and Mill Streets form common but private spaces. Still others, like Front Street East, invite larger public gatherings on a north sidewalk that in most places is five times wider than the south side, and in some spots even wider. Working from west to east, the first block to be developed held the aA- designed George Brown College stu- dent residence and the MJMA-designed Cooper Koo Cherry Street YMCA. The seven-storey residence is set atop the two-storey YMCA and has an extension that projects over Front Street East, sup- ported by a double row of two-storey high columns. The YMCA defines the street edge along Cherry and Front with a fully glazed base and serves to define the Canary District's western gateway. Next to this sits the affordable rental housing units, a composition of simple rectangular forms clad in clear and coloured glass and framed with fibre cement panels arranged in 10- and 12-storey towers. With retail at the base, the residential buildings sit above while two-storey townhouses face onto a mews that runs between the two build- ings. Designers Daoust Lestage drew from the forms and colours of rail ship- ping containers, an idea made explicit with magnified graphic floor numbers and signature colours for wayfinding. KPMB's market condominium struc- ture on Block 4 completes the north section of Front Street East making the connection to Corktown Common, an innovative park and wetland whose engineered topography hides a f lood protection landform. Massed in two parts that rise from a shared lobby, the condo has an 11-storey tower empha- sizing the sweeping curve of Bayview Avenue and a 15-storey building facing the park. Adjeleian Allen Rubeli served as the structural consultants for the work on this block. KPMB's second market condo on the project sits opposite the public hous- ing building, occupying a block that stretches south from Front Street East to Mill Street, the district's southern border. Block 11, as it is known, mixes one, t wo and three-bedroom units in an 11-storey and nine-storey slab structure whose above grade parking structure forms the base for a raised courtyard set between the towers. Halsall Associates was the structural consultant on this block, as well as for the development of the YMCA and stu- dent housing on Blocks 1 and 14, and for the affordable housing on Block 3. And with an eye to the future – the builders are targeting a LEED NC multiple build- ing certification – Halsall provided

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