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Condo Watch: The Harris Square

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The West Don Land’s latest arrival carries forward the avant-garde aesthetic established by the past three River City projects

FAST FACTS:

Harris Square
Bayview Ave & Eastern Ave
Completion: Early 2020
From: $300,000 (38 square metres)


QUICK TAKE:

It’s all been building to this. For the final phase of Urban Capital’s River City, Saucier+Perrotte Architectes and ZAS took inspiration from the irregular footprint of the area’s last remaining parcel of land – shaped, poetically, by all of the developments that have come before it – to propose a series of pentagonal plates that twist as they rise.


FROM THE STREET:

The sharp-edged design marries concrete with dark glass and black composite panels for a fusion of rough and refined that evokes some sort of extraterrestrial geological mine. A modern arcade formed between the 13-storey structure’s ground-floor retail and the five-metre-tall columns lining the edge of the mid-rise will provide a sheltered connection between Lawren Harris Square and Underpass Park.


MOVING IN:

Polygonal floor plans are a refreshing break from boxy condo layouts. On the other hand, kitchens will be kept fairly straightforward – probably a relief for anyone worried about fitting a skillet into a diamond-shaped drawer.


Featured in our roundup of six up-and-coming Toronto condo developments.

Originally published in Issue 3, 2017 as Live Here: It Takes a Village.

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And a win for children in the war against fun

To write about urbanism in Toronto is to live in a constant state of disappointment. It’s not that good things never happen here. It’s just that, too often, our big-ticket urban projects fail to live up to the hype. We get promised a radical new addition to the public realm—a bold initiative to reimagine civic life—and we end up with a condo complex or an outdoor mall. A starchitect gets hired to re-design our most storied museum, and he makes such a hash of things that, fifteen years later, we find ourselves paying to undo his work.

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