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rfmcdonaldSarah Sweet's Torontoist post about the future of the Honest Ed's site pointed me towards Alex Bozikovic's article in The Globe and Mail. A team of Vancouver architects and planners has ambitious desires for the site.
‘Just look around. There’s nobody here,” says Gregory Henriquez. The B.C. architect and I are standing next to Honest Ed’s on a rainy Saturday morning, and he is right. On this prime piece of downtown Toronto, the only figures are us and a few people he has come to meet – led by Ian Gillespie, the developer whose company will soon be rebuilding a 1.8-hectare site.
They are here together, for the first time, to establish a vision. Mr. Gillespie has a question: Why, in this prime spot in downtown Toronto, is there so little activity on the street? “We’re going to do something about that,” Mr. Gillespie says softly.
They certainly will, and their project will be one of the biggest – and one of the most visible – in Toronto’s recent history.
Mr. Gillespie’s company, Westbank Projects Corp., is signalling its approach by tapping Mr. Henriquez for the job. (An official announcement will come later this month, after he is officially registered as an architect in Ontario.)
A talented designer, Mr. Henriquez has a strong commitment to social justice. He and Westbank have collaborated, in Vancouver’s complex planning environment, on buildings with blends of market-rate and affordable housing, retail, and cultural institutions. “I bring something of a left-leaning social activist component as well as a design component,” Mr. Henriquez says. “It starts to temper the economics, and it becomes something really special.”
