Great line about high quality definitional elements in waterfront development planning

A rendering of Hariri Pontarini’s proposed Ontario Science Centre design for Ontario Place. "Doug Ford’s new Science Centre: How the architects came up with the design of the $1-billion building," Toronto Star.

John Lorinc has a piece, "Underneath the shiny renderings of Doug Ford’s Ontario Place is an idea worth taking seriously," in the Toronto Star about the proposal for a new Ontario Science Center on the Lake Erie waterfront.  From the article:

[...] I’d also argue that this project, now tendered to a consortium and estimated to be worth more than $1 billion, represents something that has long been missing in almost three decades of waterfront revitalization: a signature cultural or social institution on the lakeshore.

That idea — wish? — goes back to Robert Fung’s waterfront task force, circa the late 1990s, and is still on the planning books, with proposed locations on or near the Port Lands, but without funding or a prospective tenant.

Photos: DTAH.

Queens Quay Boulevard abuts the Toronto Waterfront. 

Toronto being a keeping-up-with-the-Jones’ kind of place, we have often looked to other cities with such architecturally distinctive structures for inspiration — the Sydney Opera House, London’s Tate Modern, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Hamburg’s exuberant concert hall in the revitalized harbour district known as Hafencity.

There’s a good reason why these landmark buildings have come to define their urban surroundings: post-industrial waterfronts demand more than glass-walled condos, office towers and parks to create a sense of place suited to the unmistakable drama of the water’s edge.

The architecture-urban design point he makes in the last cited paragraph is key.  It takes special buildings:

to create a sense of place suited to the unmistakable drama of the water’s edge.

-- Making Waves: Principles for Building Toronto's Waterfront 
-- Central Waterfront Secondary Plan
-- Central Waterfront Public Space Framework
-- Transforming the waterfront into a quintessential destination, DTAH design firm
-- Queens Quay Boulevard: Toronto's most democratic street, DTAH design firm