CONCEPT
This is not a typical Toronto park - it is an emotional and evocative place that might call up long lost memories of destitute ancestors arriving from blight ravaged Ireland on our Canadian shore with hopes for a new life in a new land.
The park design consciously looks to create a feeling for the kind of landscape that was left behind in Ireland - a bare and craggy western landscape comprising poor agricultural land on which the Irish tenant farmers could only subsist by growing potatoes in the smallest of fields. It deals with the contrasting human experiences of devastation and hopefulness.
CONTEXT
The 45m by 25m park landscape is defined on the south and east sides by Lake Ontario, on the north side by the Canada Malting Grain Silos and between these edges by six new oak trees, located immediately south of the silos.
The grain silos are by far the most dominating feature of the park due to their size and height.
DESIGN
A starkly minimal landscape is being created through the predominant use of a single material: stone.
Stone paving, stone seating and a five meter high wall of rough stone all contribute to the character of the landscape. The 25m long wall closes the Park on the west side from the world outside.
Below the oak trees and facing the City of Toronto will stand Rowan Gillespie's powerfully gaunt figures of famine immigrants making their final landing in Canada.
The existing concrete silo structure is treated as an element that is in and of the Park and not outside it, for this reason the northern boundary of the Park extends to the center-line of the southernmost silo cylinders.
Contrasting with the rough, craggy stone landscape is a tall illuminated cylinder of stacked glass approximately six meters in height. Symbolic as a beacon both of the 'new world' and the hopefulness for the future of the arriving emigrants, the glass tower contextually relates to the adjacent concrete silos and forms an icy material counterpoint to the rough stone landscape of the park.
The glass tower, similar in proportions to the concrete silos, will stand alongside three interactive computer screens which will give visitors access, at a touch, to the story of the park, the famine tragedy that it commemorates and an acknowledgement of those who made the park possible. The tower will be constructed of stacked cast glass forming a circular wall.
Internal illumination will produce a greenish watery light as it passes through the thick cast glass. The glass 'silo' will house all of the Park's controls and utilities, power, data and communication lines and conduits will be located here and made secure.
Jonathan M. Kearns
B.ARCH, OAA, MRAIC, MRIAI, RIBA
