Rendering of the redesign of Toronto’s David Crombie Park. The renewed park will retain several features including a small wading pool and concrete benches.SLA/Arcadis
On a sunny morning, schoolchildren caromed across the playground at David Crombie Park in downtown Toronto. It was recess time; these kids had crossed the street from Market Lane Junior and Senior Public School into the park, playing while some grown-ups reclined nearby.
“This place is freaking bold,” commented the landscape architect Rasmus Astrup as we walked along the edge of the seven-block-long open space. “To have a park that also serves as a schoolyard: That is almost unique in North America. It is remarkable.”
Rendering of the redesign of Toronto’s David Crombie Park from above.SLA/Arcadis
This is true. In the 1970s, the City of Toronto built this district, known as the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood, with boundary-pushing creativity. Now Crombie, the neighbourhood’s spine, will be renovated over the next three years by Mr. Astrup’s firm, SLA, Arcadis and Tawaw Architecture Collective.
Their design has important lessons about our parks, and also who gets hired to design them.
Copenhagen-based SLA bring a welcome outsider’s perspective. Their recipe is simple. Lots of seating, defined areas for plant and animal life, and clearly enclosed zones for people to linger. Also, as their vision makes clear, sometimes it’s better to work with what’s already there.
This place has history. David Crombie Park was designed in the 1970s by city staff, while the neighbourhood was being built as a mixed-income neighbourhood. The park is not a masterpiece, but it is an interesting mishmash of plantings, playgrounds and plazas. “It is a product of a modern concept of the park as an intimate living room for the block,” Mr. Astrup said.
The city decided half a decade ago that the aging park needed a rebuild. In 2020, a conventional and heavy-handed “concept design” was led by Toronto firm the Planning Partnership. It would have demolished the park’s concrete benches and half-walls; a small wading pool, beloved by neighbours, would be replaced with a splashpad.
Mr. Astrup and team recently won the job to “implement” this design, but instead revised it significantly. “We had a different approach, which was much more about preservation, keeping the identity and actually celebrating the uniqueness of this place,” he said.
Their design calls for dense thickets of trees and understory plants, producing ecologically rich zones that will cool the block, absorb water and soothe people’s moods. This is SLA’s trademark approach, which they dub “city nature”; they’re also applying it to the huge Downsview redevelopment in Toronto.
At Crombie, new and rebuilt plazas will be tightly scaled; each has plenty of seating and well-defined edges. These will be comfortable places for people-watching.
And the park’s 1970s fountain will remain. So will the wading pool and the concrete arch – a postmodernist faux-historic fragment – that bears the name of former mayor David Crombie. Slate pavers will be rearranged into a new plaza.
This preservation has multiple benefits. When it comes to those concrete benches, Neno Kovacevic, head of placemaking and landscape architecture at Arcadis in Toronto, says preservation avoids 500 tons of emissions that would come with new construction. It’s also cheaper: The designers are simply adding armrests and backrests to make the benches physically accessible. (There will be a variety of other seating as well.)
But the biggest gain will be a sense of place. SLA and company “really paid attention to important traits in the park,” says city project co-ordinator Nancy Chater, who is managing the David Crombie rebuild. “These concrete seat walls and arches are in remarkably good condition. It was an interesting idea to keep them for their sense of identity.” Sure. Anywhere is more interesting when it mixes new and old elements.
So why did it take a Danish landscape architect to pay attention?
The City of Toronto routinely fails to appreciate its own 150-year legacy of public space. Significant works of landscape and architecture are carelessly altered by operations staff; heritage planners pay little attention to the city’s own projects.
Also, the conversation is insular. A half-dozen design firms including Planning Partnership dominate public buildings and landscapes. The results have been mediocre for a long time. Sometimes you need fresh eyes to see what’s in front of you.