PROJECT The Well, Toronto, Ontario
ARCHITECTS Hariri Pontarini Architects (Masterplan and Office), Adamson Associates Architects (Executive Architect), BDP (Retail, Canopy, Landscape Architect), CCxA Architectes Paysagistes (Landscape Architect—Masterplan and Public Realm), Giannone Petricone Associates (Wellington Market), Wallman Architects (Residential Midrises), architects—Alliance (Residential Highrises), Urban Strategies (Urban Design and Planning)
PHOTOS RioCan, unless otherwise noted
TEXT John Lorinc
The elevating history of Toronto’s upward trajectory is a story that can be told in chapters, beginning with suburban slab apartments and downtown bank towers (1960s-1980s), moving through the era of arterial point tower clusters (on Bay, the Kings, North York City Centre, downtown Yonge, Jarvis) and on to massive industrial conversions (Liberty Village, the railway lands). Half a century after David Crombie imposed his infamous 45-foot freeze, height passes muster almost anywhere, and, despite policy efforts to stoke low- and midrise residential, there’s little to indicate that Toronto’s verticality will subside anytime soon.
What is quite new in the narrative of the city’s intensification is the advent of the mega-site—not just large-ish former car dealerships and the like, but precinct-sized projects that come fitted out with all manner of planning riddles, such as relationships to transit, abutting neighbourhoods, and architectural vernaculars. These sites include large inner city and suburban supermarket and mall properties, with their acres of blacktop, as well as marquis projects, such as the redevelopment of the 9.2-acre Canada Square site, at Yonge and Eglinton, by Oxford Properties and CT REIT working with Hariri Pontarini and Urban Strategies, and the former Honest Ed’s/Mirvish Village lands, which are being converted to mixed-use rental by Westbank with Henriquez Partners Architects, Diamond Schmitt Architects, Urban Strategies, and Janet Rosenberg Landscape Architects.
Most (though not all) of the developers pursuing these large-scale gigs recognize they require a more extensive tool kit—intentional architectural variety, unconventional massing, new public open spaces and, crucially, porousness to prevent such developments from becoming too monolithic.
In the case of the Galleria Mall, Almadev, working with Urban Strategies and Hariri Pontarini Architects, cut a deal with the city to build a new grid-busting diagonal road through the site and swap land to create a central park. With Mirvish Village and a future Ontario Line project at the Corktown station at King and Parliament, the designers and city planners carved out mid-block pedestrian cut-throughs, which, with the exception of a few examples in the downtown office core, represent an entirely new type of car-free public space in the city. (The Corktown site plan, prepared by SvN, includes two intersecting mid-block connections.)
The first of these mega-projects to cross the finish line is The Well, a much anticipated and heavily publicized collaboration between RioCan and Allied Properties REIT. The 7.7-acre site—which belonged to the Thomson family, owner of The Globe and Mail, whose flagship facility stood on the site for many years, and much else—includes 1.2 million square feet of office space, 320,000 square feet of retail, and some 1,700 condos and rental units. The developers estimate it will eventually house about 11,000 residents and employees, whose comings and goings are expected to sustain the retail space and provide a major boost to a somewhat ragged corner of the King West district.
Several design firms were involved in the project, including Hariri Pontarini Architects, which was responsible for the office tower and led the masterplan in collaboration with Urban Strategies and CCxA. BDP led the retail components, architects—Alliance designed the residential towers on the southern half of the site, and Wallman Architects oversaw the residential midrises on the northern half. The late Claude Cormier’s practice, CCxA, developed the landscape plan, while Adamson Associates served as executive architect.
The complex features a huge underground cistern—thus, “the well,” a name that also nods to the adjacency with Wellington Street. The reservoir is not just a fixture of the project’s internal heating/cooling infrastructure, but will also serve as a means of extending the city’s deep lake water cooling network (owned and operated by Enwave) into the western part of the core.
The Well’s headlining feature, however, is the covered passageways physically linking the various buildings that open onto Front Street, Spadina and Wellington. These mid-block, multi-level connections—lined with shops and colonnades, and then topped by a undulating latticed glass canopy—are unlike anything else in Toronto, with the possible exception of Santiago Calatrava’s smaller enclosed galleria in Brookfield’s BCE Place.
This space can be seen and experienced in two overlapping ways: as an inside-out mall, and as a means for pedestrians to move between the three streets that delineate the property. These internal lanes have no doors, and as such the passageway will function as a “privately-owned public space” (POPS), a formal designation created about a decade ago by the City of Toronto’s planning department as a means of expanding the pedestrian realm in an increasingly vertical downtown.
The most literal inspiration for The Well’s covered mall can be found in many parts of the U.K. “This idea of having a roof like an umbrella, rather than an enclosed space, is something we’ve done in the U.K. a lot,” says Adrian Price, a London-based principal at BDP, noting that British planning rules in the 1990s didn’t permit enclosed malls. He cites examples like Victoria Square in Belfast and Cabot Circus in Bristol. But, as David Pontarini notes of those U.K. projects, “They’re all mixed-use residential-retail-office sites, but they don’t work at the density [The Well] is working at. This is kind of a European-combined-with-Asian model.”
The canopy—designed collaboratively by Hariri Pontarini, BDP, and Adamson, working with RJC Engineers—extends between seven buildings. It is held aloft by V-shaped supports, relying on what Price calls a “continuous walk-in gutter” that extends around the edge of the structure to provide stiffness. The supports, in turn, are designed to have enough give to accommodate building movement, while the panels of engineered glass sit atop the lattice. “It’s the largest structure of its type in North America,” says Price.
The internal passageways of the mall provide the most intimately scaled evidence of the project’s strategy to pack the site with diverse architectural elements: the office and retail blocks facing the promenade are rendered in distinct styles and materials, including red brick, white terracotta, and metal fins. As a whole, the complex includes seven connected buildings, ranging from tall glass office towers to mid-rise brick residential blocks that step down towards Wellington, self-consciously referencing the scale and massing of the King West brick-and-beam warehouses immediately to the north. The north face of the office towers features a glass elevator, offering commanding views of the west end, while a rooftop restaurant provides sweeping vistas of downtown.
Two of the residential towers on the Front Street side are aligned, sensibly, off the customary Toronto grid so as to avoid direct exposure to morning and afternoon sun. Thus situated, they bear a certain resemblance to the off-centre orientation of every sun-destination hotel or condo. But this decision reflects an important and all-too-often ignored reality about the thermal loading that is endemic in so many high-rise glazed residential towers in Toronto.
The site’s intentional mix of architectural forms and styles holds up a mirror to the extraordinary variety in built form in the chunk of King West that extends from Spadina over to Tecumseh. The precinct now includes everything from early-19th-century workers’ cottages to the Bjarke Ingels Group’s King Toronto—a Habitat-esque confection, created with developers Westbank and Allied Properties, and designer Diamond Schmitt Architects. Hariri Pontarini worked on another mixed-use Allied/RioCan project across the street from where King Toronto is under construction—the King Portland Centre. The King Portland Centre and The Well share a strategy of leveraging the network of mid-block passageways which have long been a feature of the area.
Indeed, The Well’s urban design is its most distinctive feature. The entrance portal from the corner of Spadina and Front—for years, a car dealership—is now all show business, while the north-facing edge, just around the corner, seems to want to blend into, but also define, a rather staid stretch of Wellington. The project planners are to be commended for providing a generous and well-landscaped sidewalk allowance on this side of The Well. However, it remains to be seen whether the former buzz of that stretch of Wellington, with its industrial businesses, bistros and oddball clubs, will ever come back—or if it is now destined to remain a kind of high-end residential interstitial space between Front and King.
As for the south side, the passageway and adjoining condo entrances opening onto Front are likely to spend the next 10 to 15 years staring at what will become a vast construction site. The five-tower Rail Deck District project is to be cantilevered over the GO/VIA rail corridor, after prevailing in a tense air-rights battle with the City of Toronto over the latter’s plan to build a multi-billion-dollar park above the tracks. Metrolinx also has a block of land reserved across Front Street from The Well for a future shoulder-station.
For the time being, the question posed by The Well and its highly deliberate urban design choices is a variation on the one that Eb Zeidler’s Eaton Centre posed when it opened in the late 1970s. Will the mall’s gravitational pull suck King Westers, in all their guises, away from King and Lower Spadina? Or does its porousness—a feature that serves as a notable point of differentiation with the Eaton Centre—represent a meaningful addition to the urban connectivity of that neighbourhood?
It feels trite to say here that time will tell. Yet the breathtaking dynamism of King West’s urban form can lead to no other conclusion for the moment. The enormous project has enormous ambitions, setting out to meaningfully address itself to the three streets around it, and to create a new downtown hub. But it begins life as a kind of island of high density within a mid-rise neighbourhood that’s very much in flux. How well The Well serves the future and evolving King West is an open question, yet one whose answer is revealing itself bit by bit—and now mega-block by mega-block—with each passing year.
John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist who writes about planning, public space and development for Spacing and The Globe and Mail. Follow him on X at @johnlorinc.
CLIENT RioCan REIT, Allied | RESIDENTIAL CLIENT TRIDEL, RioCan Living, Woodbourne Capital Canada | ARCHITECT TEAMS Hariri Pontarini Architects—David Pontarini, Michael Conway, Douglas Keith, Ali Soleymani, Shuan Liu, Elnaz Sabouri, Michele Hauner, Dorna Ghorashi, Alyssa Goraieb, Asem Alhadrab, Brad Moore. Hariri Pontarini Architects (Interior Design)—Cathy Knott, Danielle Tsisko, Victoria Kwon, Paloma Pontarini, Emma Craig. Adamson Associates Architects—Bill Bradley, Domenic Virdo, David Jansen, Alex Richter, Jack Cusimano, Steve Carroll, Deni Di Filippo, Navjit Singh Matharu, Rasha Mousa, Anna Satchkova, Gianni Meogrossi, Gordon Adair, Pam Bruneau, Chuck Comartin, Martin Dolan, Alfredo Falcone, Ana Gadin, Sarah Gilbert, Margarita Goyzueta, Dwayne Keith, Negar Khalili, Jimin Kim, Mike Koehler, Gilles Leger, Tonino Ottaviani, Theresa Prince, Dan Rubenzahl, Arlene So, Gintaras Valiulis, Gabriel Virag, Ashley Wewiora. BDP—Adrian Price, Steve Downey, Roberta Massabo, Maarten Mutters, Greg Froggatt, Lauren Copping, Marco Cosmi, Paul Foster, Malcolm De Cruz, Catherine Griffiths, Ivan Popov, Michelle Wong, Hoa Quan, Maria Martinez, Simon Perez, Trevor Pool, Luminita Musat, Emilie Kwapisz, Daniele De Paula, Millan Tarazona, Peter Coleman, Waimond Ip, Adriano Scarfo. BDP (Interior Design)—Justin Parsons, Sean Rainey, Cora Granier, Amy Simpson, Vivien Kerr, Anna Carnevale, Melodie Peters. Concept Lighting—Colin Ball, Sarah Alsayed, Mim Beaufort, Jono Redden. BDP (Landscape)—Mehron Kirk, Lucy White, Cedric Chausse, Bethany Gale, Martyna Dobosz, Dalia Todary-Michael. Wallman Architects—Rudy Wallman, Rod Pell, Khodayar Shafaei, Michael Panacci, Aleksandra Mazowiec, Tristan Armesto, Shaun Oldfield. CCxa Architectes Paysagistes—Claude Cormier, Guillaume Paradis, Logan Littlefield, Yannick Roberge, Marc Hallé, James Cole, Yi Zhou, Hélio Araujo, Georges-Étienne Parent, Nicole M. Meier. Architects—Alliance: Peter Clewes, Adam Feldmann, Oliver Laumeyer, Barb Zee, Helen Tran, Nicolas Peters, Sophia Radev, Dele Oladunmoye, Robert Connor, Lisa Maharaj, Anna Wan, Jason DeLine, Carl Caliva. Giannone Petricone Associates—Ralph Giannone, Andria Vacca, Cassandra Hryniw, Carlo Odorico, Katherine French, Amy Piccinni, Tracy Ho, Shane Alharbi, Yoland Senik, Hung Hoang. Urban Strategies—George Dark, Dennis Lago, Geoff Whittaker, Craig Cal, Pino Di Mascio | STRUCTURAL RJC Engineers (Daniel Sokolowski) | STRUCTURAL (RESIDENTIAL) Jablonsky Ast & Partners | ELECTRICAL/IT/COMMUNICATIONS/AV/SECURITY/LIGHTING Mulvey & Banani (Eric Cornish, Olumide Joseph, Nirojan Ketheeswaran | Mechanical The Mitchell Partnership (James McEwan, Camille Williams) | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL (RESIDENTIAL) Novatrend | CIVIL Odan/Detech Group, Inc. | ACOUSTICS & VIBRATION HGC Engineering | HARDWARE Trillium Architectural Products | TRANSPORTATION/PARKING BA Consulting Group | WIND RWDI | FIRE/CODE/LIFE SAFETY/ACCESSIBILITY LRI Engineering, Inc. | VERTICAL TRANSPORTATION Soberman Engineering | SURVEYOR J.D. Barnes | EXTERIOR BUILDING MAINTENANCE RDP Associates | ice/snow Microclimate Ice & Snow Inc. | WASTE MANAGEMENT Cini-Little International, Inc. | LANDSCAPE (RESIDENTIAL) Janet Rosenberg & Studio, MBTW | SUSTAINABILITY EQ Building Performance | SHORING AND EXCAVATION Isherwood Geostructural Engineers, GFL Environmental | CONSTRUCTION MANAGERS EllisDon, Deltera, Knightsbridge | CODE LRI (Steven Grant) | STRUCTURE AVENUE-verdi jv | CLADDING & ROOFING Bothwell-Accurate | CANOPY Gartner GMBH | CONCEPT LIGHTING BDP | LIGHTING Mulvey & Banani (Stephen Kaye) | WAYFINDING kramer design associates | LANDSCAPE SUBCONSULTANTS Albert Mondor (planting); Joe Carter (irrigation); Peter Simon (urban forestry) | AREA 7.67 acres | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION November 2023