ERA is thrilled to announce the Gordonridge Community Multi-Sport Court has won a Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) National Award of Excellence in the Residential Landscapes category.
This unique community-led project is located at the heart of the Gordonridge Toronto Community Housing campus in Scarborough. The new court brings residents of all ages and abilities together in a dynamic landscape intervention which includes a running track, basketball courts, skatepark, parkour, pickleball, volleyball and table tennis, as well as a central garden. Through integration of the court with the adjacent topiary, community gardens and orchards, it has become a nexus of neighbourhood activity.
ERA collaborated with the Gordonridge community for over a year, with the outcome being a design that reflects its values, interests and identity. As co-designers, residents were integrally involved in the process from the early ideation stages through construction. The impact of the court on residents has been transformative, giving the Gordonridge community a dynamic place to play, gather, garden and exercise at the heart of their neighbourhood. Read more about the community design process.
Congratulations to the Gordonridge community, Toronto Community Housing, MLSE Foundation and Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities on this recognition!
For more on this award and other awardees, visit CSLA.
Ontario Place in the 1980s (City of Toronto Archives)
Our iconic sites have a shared value, with a conceived opinion in the public realm. As residents, we understand and view these buildings with a collective lens made up of our past experiences formed individually and as a city.
While some buildings easily come to mind, take Toronto’s Old City Hall or the ROM as examples, others have the potential to become iconic with a more careful understanding and with added celebration and support of these sites. Ontario Place has the ability to become a deeply loved space in our city and our province, but it’s lacking a shared identity, an issue exacerbated by continued disinvestment.
ERA Principal Michael McClelland spoke to this idea in a session with the Future of Ontario Place Colloquium. Held on February 17, the event titled “The Future of Ontario Place: Revitalizing Iconic Modern Waterfront Sites” placed Ontario Place within the context of both the Sydney Opera House and Montreal’s Expo ’67.
Ontario Place, the Forum and exterior views, 1980-1987 (City of Toronto Archives)
Michael has been a long proponent of the cultural value of Ontario Place as a shining example of modernist architecture and as an important contribution to Toronto’s public realm. In 1994, Michael was part of the group that founded Docomomo Canada-Ontario, an organization that looked to recognize the modern architectural movement in the province. Ontario Place was among the 14 sites listed to Docomomo’s International Register.
Ontario Place faced countless pressures and changes in its history, from the closure of the beloved forum for what would become the Budweiser Stage, to its eventual closure in 2012.
Now, close to ten years later, Ontario Place is at yet another crossroads. In 2019, the World Monuments Fund named Ontario Place on its World Monuments Watch list, flagging it as a heritage site at risk of being lost. In response to threats to the site, the Future of Ontario Place Project was born, a collaborative effort between the World Monuments Fund, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, and Architectural Conservancy Ontario. The project aims to increase public awareness and engagement about the site and its heritage values to imagine the future of Ontario Place as an asset for all.
It has been so long since the site was operable that there is a new host of Torontonians whose experience of the city doesn’t include Ontario Place at all. While Ontario Place may have secured a stronger shared understanding of place if it remained open and in use, its identity has become fractured over time.
But what if we focused not on its use or its identity and instead on other established attributes of the site?
When it was built in 1971 in response to Montreal’s Expo 67, architect Eberhard Zeidler wanted Ontario Place to reclaim the shoreline for people. “The meeting of water and land brought to a poetic awareness,” he wrote.
Toronto has a longstanding and shared relationship with its waterfront, from the beloved Scarborough Bluffs to Sunnyside, with Sugar Beach, Harbourfront Centre and the Simcoe WaveDeck downtown. Ontario Place has the ability to connect expressions of the waterfront experience in Toronto.
Harbourfront Centre (Scott Webb via Unsplash)
This was the vision explored in the Waterfront Heritage and Cultural Infrastructure Plan that ERA helped develop in 2003. The plan established a vision focused on culture and heritage as essential components to the future investment in Toronto’s waterfront. Ontario Place was the connecter of this vision, which imagined a revitalized waterfront that included a web of experiences to reflect the diversity of the city’s cultural life.
Ontario Place’s revitalization can be successful if we begin to focus on its attributes that contribute to the shared vision of the site — as a place where water and edge meet. While we’re ways along from fully understanding the shared value of the site, we must celebrate and re-establish Ontario Place as a thriving public space in order to better understand its significance to the public understanding.
Aerial views of Fort York, Exhibition Place and Ontario Place (City of Toronto Archives)
This takes time. We must give the site time breathe and exist, focusing on the values of water, edge and the connections that happen on the site. In due time this will help Ontario Place find its place along Toronto’s waterfront and in our collective consciousness.
Working closely with communities to create place-based, local designs is integral to ERA’s approach. In September, we celebrated the completion of Gordonridge’s new multi-sport court. This project was a collaborative effort through-and-through, with our partners at MLSE Foundation and Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities, our client at Toronto Community Housing, and its users, the community at Gordonridge.
Gordonridge is ERA’s third project in partnership with MLSE and Jumpstart, developing place-based recreational spaces with community stakeholders, providing youth and adults a safe space to play and access a variety of sports and community events within their neighbourhoods.
The court is positioned at the heart of the tight-knit Gordonridge campus, a post-war apartment complex which is home to more than 800 households. Post-war neighbourhoods can sometimes offer disconnected car-centric, sprawling design. By contrast, Gordonridge’s “town square” is its collection of community-led initiatives: over the years, Gordonridge residents have built an apiary, community garden, market garden, and fruit orchard. The multi-sport court is designed to be the hub that connects these spokes, tracing accessible routes through the property. Pathways, along with shaded seating and gathering areas, encourage shared multi-generational use of the space — older residents on the way to the apiary, the youth on the basketball courts.
As the Prime Consultant and Landscape Architect, ERA developed and led a series of collaborative community design-workshops, developed a design that responded to what we heard, and provided ongoing communication with the key stakeholders throughout construction to ensure that the outcomes were in line with the neighbourhood’s vision.
Over the course of a year, ERA listened, tested ideas, shared meals, and played basketball at Gordonridge. We learned the community was selling honey from the apiary, and that residents were learning to cultivate its fruit orchard – but that access to those initiatives was challenging, so we drew paths along those desire lines. We learned from the youth that the senior residents would like a place to walk, and so we incorporated a walking circuit into the court. We found space for the local gardeners to create a small plot in the court. By the time the court opened late last year, the community were both co-designers and co-owners of the new space.
It’s a process that for us is a remarkable and exciting endeavour. We’re thrilled the neighbourhood feels the same!
We are patiently awaiting the spring when we hope the court will be in full use. The pandemic has not only delayed the use of the court but has underscored the importance of access to safe outdoor gathering spaces for exercise and fresh air.
The Gordonridge Commmunity Multi-Sport Court demonstrates the power of investment in communities, allowing residents of all ages to gather, exercise, play and continue to build local support networks so vital to our thriving cities and neighbourhoods.
MLSE Foundation has pulled together more great content, including the video above, over on their website.
