Claude Cormier Landscape Architects: Sugar Beach is the second urban beach proposed for Toronto’s downtown waterfront, and the latest addition to the amber necklace of Toronto’s lakefront beach-scape. It is a sequel to HtO, the waterfront’s first beach park. The proposal for Jarvis Slip playfully recomposes other signature elements of the city, with Toronto playing the role as its own design precedent. The omnipresent horizon of the lake and adjacent industrial buildings recalls Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884). Tinted by sugar spray carried on westerly breezes from the neighboring Redpath Sugar Factory, a series of hard rock candies with colored stripes and dozens of pink umbrellas are scattered across a sandy wedge of beach along the Jarvis Slip. Integrating the future Waterfront Promenade, along with a plaza for programmed and un-programmed events, the design playfully adopts some of the most enduring elements from Toronto’s emerging landscape identity—beaches, bedrock, trees, and water—as well as the urban horizon and a trace of the city’s past industrial mood.
Landscape Architecture: Claude Cormier Landscape Architects
Location: Toronto, Canada
Area: 4000m²
Year: 2008-2010 – under construction
Text&images: Claude Cormier
Though it’s a bit difficult to get past the pretty imagery in order to see the actual design, the smoothness of the forms, the patterns on the ground and the canopy of the trees works well. The project looks promising from the construction photos.