A 2023 competition for the Gadbois Centre in Montreal, a suburban rec centre, delivered a gorgeous design by ADHOC with Prisme Architects.Prisme + ADHOC inc., GBI Experts-Conseils inc./Supplied
What does it take to make a great place for people? How about $125-million and a site next to a park and a subway station?
In Toronto, that might be enough – or it might not. The site in question is Ramsden Park, across the street from the Rosedale subway and walking distance from the Yonge-Bloor subway interchange. It’s planned to include a gym, two pools and other facilities. A public meeting Monday will introduce the project to the public.
Ramsden embodies the potential of public design in Toronto. It raises two serious questions: Should the rec centre be combined with housing? And what kind of a place should it be?
On housing: The site, currently a parking lot, is big enough to accommodate a tower and a rec centre. It should be folded into the city’s Housing Now program.
“The city regularly mandates the inclusion of public libraries and recreation centres into private developments in Toronto, but it is unwilling to hold its own agencies to the same delivery standards,” says Mark Richardson, technical lead with the advocacy group HousingNowTO.
He’s right. Every significant public building should have a housing tower on top of it. Mayor Olivia Chow should make this a job requirement for senior city staff. If the city’s own made-up rules get in the way, she should overrule them. Case in point: Housing was considered here, but the idea was dismissed because of concerns with shadowing the park.
(City urban design staff are fixated on the idea that shadows ruin public space. That dogma needs to be rigorously tested every time.)
Other ideas also need to be challenged when it comes to the building’s design. The Parks & Recreation department now builds large centralized recreation centres such as the Ramsden one. These lack the qualities that actually make community: space to just hang out, somewhere to grab a coffee, a sheltered courtyard. These things don’t have to cost much. Yet they aren’t what the department is focused on, so we keep missing them.
In Toronto these days, one of four architecture firms gets hired to design the new centres. If we’re lucky, the architects at MJMA win the job. If not, the results are big boxes: hunks of aloof corporate modernism wrapped in vertical slats, cut off from the landscape around them.
These go through near-endless public consultation. Another planned project, the Wabash Community Recreation Centre, was redesigned after neighbours picked a different (and more expensive) architectural configuration. This is one reason the budget jumped to $112-million from $34-million so far.
The best solution to all of these problems is a design competition. Across Europe, as well as in Quebec, competitions are widely seen as a basic tool of procurement.
Jean-Pierre Chupin, an architect and professor at the University of Montreal, told me a successful competition provides a “collective judgment” of design professionals, building users and citizens. Do the big thinking and consultation up front, hire designers by rigorously testing their ideas, adjust your thinking as necessary and build quickly.
Montreal has had amazing success this way with buildings such as the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Cultural Centre. A 2023 competition for the Gadbois Centre, a suburban rec centre, delivered a gorgeous design by ADHOC with Prisme Architects. It blends natural materials, efficient space planning and a generous indoor square – at half the cost of a typical Toronto project.
Toronto can learn from these successes, though it won’t be easy. The Park & Recreation department has three different directors involved in “capital planning and delivery.” The city overall still has no chief architect, who could push such a project to success. But these things can be fixed. Is there a chief planner or a strong mayor who is ready to push for the things that matter most?
Editor’s note: (March 25, 2025): An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the site for the Ramsden Park building includes a public works garage. It does not.