The restored Sundial Folly, designed by Jonathan Fung and Paul Figueiredo.Dave LeBlanc/The Globe and Mail
The big sphere in Harbour Square Park West holds stories.
Stories of 1980s dreams and a competition, of winners and losers, of bureaucratic cold feet, and of watering down a bold design.
The concrete sphere, designed by Jonathan Fung and Paul Figueiredo and known as Sundial Folly, was recently restored by Clifford Restoration. Spiffed up with new copper and wood bits, washed of graffiti and algae, patched and polished, it almost glows. Fittingly, Clifford recently won an award from the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario for this work.
“We had to erect access in there and we weren’t allowed to bear any weight on the actual sculpture,” said architectural conservator Donovan Pauly when he met me on site a few weeks ago. “Everything had to be cantilevered off the centre … so it was scaffolded around in the pool here.”
Unfortunately, despite its fresh face, the sphere remains steadfastly silent. But I won’t, so buckle up.
Condo buildings in front of Harbour Square Park.Dave LeBlanc/The Globe and Mail
In 1972, when Campeau Corp. began construction on the condominium slabs and hotel towers of Harbour Square between Yonge and York streets, Toronto hadn’t thought much of finding pleasure at its (then mostly industrial) waterfront – that was something for the Islands. But, by the mid-1980s, the concrete wall began to feel like a big middle finger aimed back at the city.
So, in the spring and summer of 1985, the City of Toronto announced a competition for Toronto Waterfront Park. A newspaper advertisement invited “architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and students” to submit entries by October of that year to the planning and development department. On Nov. 16, 1985, after receiving more than 100 entries from around the world, a trio of fresh-faced, University of Waterloo graduates (class of 1980) took the top prize.
The entrance to Toronto's Harbour Square Park West.Dave LeBlanc/The Globe and Mail
The most famous of the five judges, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, apparently scribbled the winning design on a napkin during a judge’s dinner and said, “‘If this isn’t winning, I’m out of here,’” Nolan Natale says with a laugh. Mr. Natale was one member of the winning trio that also included Chris Browne and Tim Scott. Mr. Natale still has the napkin – it was gifted to him by a judge after the competition.
A sketch of the waterfront's design by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.Courtesy Nolan Natale
“The whole premise of the competition,” Mr. Natale continues, “was spurred on by the idea that these developments that were happening … had really cut off the waterfront. So, the key idea was somehow you need to make these pieces of land along the waterfront unequivocally public.”
One way to make it crystal clear that the park did not belong to the development was to detach it from the mainland, which is exactly what the Natale-Scott-Browne team proposed. Three square islands – one big, one medium, one small – would connect to the mainland by a sweeping, curved bridge while also providing a viewing platform, and a salvaged and restored marine warehouse building would float on a barge beside the largest, easternmost island (it’s now at the foot of York Street, painted bright red, and contains a BeaverTails outlet). Some islands would have grottos, others formal gardens, and there would be terraces for sitting and viewing.
The former marine warehouse.Dave LeBlanc/The Globe and Mail
In architecture critic Odile Hénault’s short-lived magazine Section a (Ms. Hénault was one of the judges), architect Detlef Mertins called the Natale-Scott-Browne scheme “fiendishly clever, at once restrained and playful, simple in its essential composition and rich in its elaboration.” Mainstream media, too, gushed that Toronto was finally taking back its waterfront.
And yet, despite the praise, the city failed to put shovels in the ground. Two-and-a-half years later, Lisa Rochon reported in The Globe and Mail that city parks commissioner Herbert Pirk wanted to take another look at the winner and the four runners-up to determine “whether the winning design could be implemented.” (Some of the runners-up included now well-known Toronto names such as James Brown, Kim Storey and Dermot Sweeny). Worried the city might cherry-pick random elements of the design, Chris Browne was quoted as saying that a “design is much more than a collection of pieces.”
The Natale-Scott-Browne design of the waterfront.Courtesy Nolan Natale
Finally, says Mr. Natale, by the late-80s a radically scaled-down version of the winning scheme broke ground (with landscape architects Fleisher Ridout). No islands, no bridges, no drastic changes in plantings, no terraces, no barge – only boardwalks, trees, some berms and a few promontories. And, by 1995, when Sundial Folly was installed at water’s edge, Mr. Natale says his involvement was over.
And yet, the 73-year-old harbours no ill will: “Maybe I should, I just don’t; Tim, Chris and I were happy to continue work on it. There were ideas in the scheme that we thought were important things to say about waterfronts, their value, their public nature. … I don’t think we had big egos.”
The waterfront's boardwalk with Sundial Folly in the background.Dave LeBlanc/The Globe and Mail
A few days ago, I visited Harbour Square Park East and West. Standing on the north side of Queens Quay at Bay Street, it’s difficult to pick out the entrance as the towers are just too overwhelming. And, even once found and the water draws one south, there are multiple points where Natale-Scott-Browne’s trails and the developer’s pavement touch – there is even a parking lot that interrupts the scheme – which muddles the line between what’s public and what’s private. While the boardwalk is wonderful and obviously public, a portion of the paved trail higher up comes annoyingly close to unfriendly. Walking further west to view Sundial Folly, while the trellis is lovely, the path leading to the sculpture is hardscrabble and unmarked.
Dave LeBlanc/The Globe and Mail
Despite Mr. Natale’s sunny assessment that it’s like “walking down a path in the woods,” I think the city can do better. We’ve done it with the Music Garden, HTO Park, Sugar Beach, Ireland Park and the new Ookwemin Minising island (formerly known as Villiers Island). Let’s build the park that Natale-Scott-Browne designed in 1985. Maybe we can invite Mr. Koolhaas to return and give a speech.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article referred to a new waterfront island by its former name. This version updates the name, Ookwemin Minising, and also corrects the spelling of the former name, Villiers Island.