Talking with John Patkau and Jonathan Kearns

While working on another proposal with Toronto’s Kearns Mancini, John Patkau of Patkau Architects, Vancouver, suggested that the two firms submit a co-entry in last year’s design competition for Fort York’s long-awaited new Visitor Centre. The two firms were attracted to the project because it offered the opportunity to develop a site of national importance while rising to the design challenges of, in Kearns’ words, “a peculiar site,” nestled between rail lines, the Gardiner Expressway, and the unexplored archaeological resources of the Garrison Common.

The result of this collaboration—which was chosen as the winning design from an original field of thirty-one firms expressing interest—is a unique building that calls upon each firm’s strengths: Jonathan Kearns’ strength in working with and around heritage sites; and the Patkaus’ strength in sensitively responding to landscape and the particularities of place.

Of Irish origin, Kearns immigrated to Canada after graduating from Ireland’s National University School of Architecture in the mid-1970s. Since establishing Kearns Mancini Architects Inc. in 1981, Kearns has designed projects across the GTA, in Ireland, in Kuala Lumpur, and Sao Paulo. He’s developed a solid reputation along the way for integrating contemporary design with heritage structures at the Senator O’Connor College School, incorporating a hundred-year-old structure into the expansion of George Brown College culinary school, and providing the founding vision for the Community Care Consortium’s redesign of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and its grounds. Kearns’ reputation is such that even John Patkau acknowledges that Kearns has “greater sensitivity to history than most Canadians.”

Weekend visits from Vancouver by John and Patricia Patkau allowed the collaboration to get underway. Design workshops were held in a conference room of the Kearns Mancini offices—located just across the tracks from the fort on Atlantic Avenue—where historical plans and maps were overlaid on the wall, showing all the ways history has affected the site, and allowing the architects to sketch ideas right onto the maps themselves. Then, the group would walk the actual site terrain.

Kearns says that from his experience with Ireland Park, a contemporary commemoration of Irish immigration to Toronto, on a salvaged site in the shadows of the Canada Malting Silos, he was well prepared for the Visitor Centre. There, as at Fort York, no heritage structures were in play but Ireland Park put Kearns in the right mindset to tackle Fort York as a contemporary site that connects visitors to a story of the city’s past. As with Ireland Park, Kearns sought to create a structure that brings out the story of the site in a sympathetic way.

And so they have created a contemporary building, meant to work within the existing landscape while easing the visitor’s transition into the past. The building is one-hundred percent contemporary, incorporating state-of-the-art media technology to educate visitors and contextualize the fort’s significance. In “a nice inversion,” Kearns notes, the building itself encompasses the transition from a lower, modern landscape to an upper archaeological landscape: from the modern streetscape to the interior exhibits, up through the Time Tunnel to boardwalks overlooking archaeological digs on the Common, and finally to the fort itself.

Over the course of their career, the Patkaus have been known for their keen understanding of the important relationship between architecture and landscape. The pair, both born and educated in Manitoba, formed Patkau Architects in 1978 (and moved the firm from Edmonton to Vancouver in 1984). In recent years they have undertaken major projects for universities in the U.S. and Canada as well as the Grande Bibliothèque in Montreal. The firm’s international reputation was initially built on more modest-scaled libraries, cultural facilities—such as Waterloo’s Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery—and private residences.

Although much of the Patkaus’ previous work has been built in a suburban or rural context, Patkau notes that the constraints of the Visitor Centre site make it a natural fit for them as designers. Through award-winning projects like Barnes House (Nanaimo, BC) and the Seabird Island School (Agassiz, BC), Patkau Architects has long experience sensitively adapting architectural designs to the particularities of unconventional, irregular natural sites.

The Patkaus and Kearns realized early on, while experimenting with design possibilities, that building under the Gardiner would not work. Not wanting the Visitor Centre to clash with the fort, the design team also decided against a conventional building.

So they decided on a lower profile building, one that blended architecture and landscape into a cohesive whole. “We almost thought of the building,” Kearns says, “as a piece of landscape architecture.”

In doing so, they turned some of the challenges of the site into strengths of their design. This section of the Gardiner—slated for refurbishment—is at the freeway’s highest elevation, and provides, by Kearns’ definition, “a cathedral quality of space” for a covered (and surprisingly quiet) urban space. The winning design, Patkau notes, views the Garrison Common as a “powerful open space,” reconfigured and reshaped from its present condition. The tree nursery is being relocated, Garrison Road will be moved, and the Common’s current downward slope towards Fort York Boulevard will be reshaped. The Common will be enlarged to the edge of the expressway, where a new retaining wall gives a near vertical drop to the flattened space below the Gardiner.

The wall also provides an iconic public presence along the boulevard for the Visitor Centre. Using steel that oxidizes to deep soil-colouring, the wall echoes the fort’s defensive character; but some steel slabs will be flipped up to provide openings into the Visitor Centre’s exhibits, café, and public spaces.

In addition, the steel wall traces the former contours of the lakeshore along with potential wetland features and pavement of recycled glass. Amid piers and terraces, grasses grown to three or four feet will sway in the wind, evoking memory of lapping waves—a sensation made stronger at night by the grass’s illumination by the blue lights of the Watertable art installation under the expressway.

Beyond Fort York’s important role as a heritage site or tourist venue, thinking about the building as landscape strengthens the site’s new role as a community centre, neighbourhood park, and a crossroads of the city’s growing network of bicycle trails. Looking beyond the present needs of a Visitor Centre, the Patkau/Kearns Mancini entry in the design competition is expandable. A courtyard will connect Fort York with the Armoury, expanding the stories the site can tell. By happy coincidence the Visitor Centre is well-sited to support whatever role the Armoury will have if the Department of National Defence leaves before its lease on the property runs out in 2031.

Kevin Plummer, who recently joined the Friends’ Communications Committee, is a regular contributor to the Torontoist blog, and to Heritage Toronto’s blog. He also has a day job.