2016 MCHAP
Fort York National Historic Site Visitor Centre
John & Patricia Patkau
Toronto, Canada
September 2014
PRIMARY AUTHOR
John Patkau Patricia Patkau
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
Jonathan Kearns / Kearns Mancini Architects (Partner in Charge)
CLIENT
David O'Hara for the City of Toronto
PHOTOGRAPHER
Tom Arban Photography Vik Pahwa Shane ONeill
OBJECTIVE
The new Visitor Centre is intended to re-establish the site as part of Toronto’s identity and as a cultural touchstone for Canada. The delicacy of Fort York as a defensive site produces an architecture that is mostly about lines. Existing lines such as the lines of Fort walls and the lines of sharpened logs ("frise" -- a defense of pointed stakes projecting from the ramparts in a horizontal or an inclined position) are our source of new lines - lines of weathering steel walls, lines of docks and bridges, lines of light. The grassed defensive moat in front of the Fort and the surprisingly low berm rampart are both quiet and subtle. These earthworks are experienced from Garrison Common, the battlefield which fronts them, as a liquid rolling of the land, a delicate move but one with severe consequences. Lines and Liquid Landscapes suggest the architecture of our project. We redefine the lost south boundary of the Common with a new escarpment of weathering steel. As this wall is not the original line of the defensive landscape, its materiality is decidedly new. It is a major new infrastructural and landscape-scaled dashed line: an extended wall capable of joining with the scale of the elevated Gardiner above to form a great new urban space for Toronto.
CONTEXT
Fort York dates from the late 1700s and is considered the birthplace of Toronto. It is the single most important visual and cultural heritage link to British military and social history remaining in the City of Toronto. The original location, on the shore of Lake Ontario protecting the harbour of York, now Toronto, has been altered by two centuries of infill so that it is now 500 metres from the shoreline of the Lake and located almost immediately below the elevated Gardiner Expressway. Our project is to construct a visitor centre to introduce and reposition the Fort within a context which has changed radically from when the Fort was constructed and in use. The site has long been isolated within the urban fabric by the processes of development – waterfront land reclamation and infrastructural corridors of rail and elevated highway. The concrete curtain of the elevated Gardiner Expressway, Bathurst St Bridge and no man’s land of the rail lines have brutalized the geographic context and marginalized the Fort. Recent residential development nearby presented an opportunity to make the Fort the focal point of these new neighbourhoods – both as urban amenity and cultural anchor.
PERFORMANCE
In front of the steel escarpment a field of softly moving grasses and loose bushes and flowers, another liquid landscape, recalls the former presence of the Lake. An ‘events dock’ will reach out into this liquid landscape stretching from the entry bridge to an existing ‘liquid light’ art installation under the Gardiner. This is where Fort York welcomes the modern city with large-scale events. Illuminated boat-like objects float in the liquid lawn, tethered to the dock. Party and event goers lounge in intimate groups in the floats, edging crowds on the dock. The Visitor Centre inhabits the space behind the weathering steel escarpment. The entrance is below the Expressway, across a bridge which spans the liquid foreshore below. Inside are lobby areas, permanent and temporary exhibition spaces illustrating the history of the Fort, an informal dining area, meeting rooms and administration offices. A multi-media immersive ‘time-tunnel’ portraying the dramatic events of the War of 1812/14 rises from the entrance level to emerge on the Common, connecting the modern city below to the Fort above.