Jarvis Slip Design Winner Announced

The winner of the Jarvis slip design competition is Claude Cormier’s “Sugar Beach,” or, as I like to call it, “HTO East.” The Sugar Beach concept borrows heavily from Toronto’s other urban beach, HTO which was also designed by Cormier, ironically, in collaboration with another firm participating in the Jarvis competition, Janet Rosenberg + Associates. [I had earlier been unaware of Cormier’s involvement with HTO. Thanks to Anonymous for pointing this out.] The concept is simple: sand and umbrellas. Except this time there will be more than one colour of umbrella to evoke candy as inspired by the sugar refinery across the slip. And hopefully, the chairs beneath them will actually be funded by the project, unlike HTO, where the city took away the overstock chairs the park had opened with once they became broken.

The concept is good even if it is recycled. The beach will succeed provided the shoreline is unobstructed. The promenade behind the beach succeeds because of a triangular decking over the slip that widens the entry point into the square. This is a feature where the other proposals failed. Both envisioned a deck along the whole back edge of the slip which would not be possible with the docking of cargo ships. Unfortunately, the Cormier submission fails to create a viable plaza as the final space in the square. Instead, it calls for monolithic rock mounds. I don’t even think rocks that big can be imported. And I’m sure no one would stand on an incline for the entire course of whatever programming is planned for the rock plaza. Nor would they sit on a hot rock under the summer sun.

So two out of three successes is commendable. Especially when you consider what was avoided: the unceasing movement of West 8’s robot appendages and Rosenberg’s hypnotic wind pixel screen. Sometimes architecture should be solid like a rock, just not an actual rock.