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2008 National Urban Design Awards
Urban Architecture
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Canada's National Ballet School / Project Grand Jeté:
Stage 1 Jarvis Street Campus and Radio City
(Toronto, ON) |
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 The NBS/Radio City development establishes a model for the harmonious co-existence of heritage and contemporary architecture and demonstrates broadly recognized urban planning principles that link the level of street life and diversity of activities to the level of safety in a neighbourhood. The original goals were to catalyse the revitalization of Jarvis Street, Toronto's first upper class residential neighbourhood which experienced long term economic decline since World War II; to introduce much-needed home ownership options into a high density rental market; and to stimulate community pride through its award-winning architecture.
Jury Comments:
The design of the National Ballet School has received national and international coverage and numerous awards, but its real urban success lies in the organisation of the larger site, in the combination of cultural and intensive residential uses, and in the inventive collaboration of the multi-disciplinary teams representing the dual clients. The result is a rich integration of uses, forms and spaces, and of the adaptive reuse of heritage buildings with a carefully nuanced contemporary architecture, which together animate the adjoining streets and help revitalize a formerly declining city neighbourhood.
There was strong competition from across Canada in this category, but jury members particularly admired the way the range of activities and historical layers had been interlaced on the site, the sympathetic qualities, careful detailing, and scale of its street related architecture, and the manner in which the transparent, vertically stacked dance studios engage with the life of the city around them. The project reflects an imaginative and markedly successful urban design plan for the combined site, which has contributed significantly to the renewal and intensification of this part of the city, and resulted in major improvements to the quality of the public environment around it and in internal public courtyards and laneways penetrating the site itself.
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Jury Members >> |
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