Ontario Place Visit

This past fall I took part in a student competition to reimagine a future for Ontario Place. Ontario Place is a former entertainment venue to the west of downtown Toronto along the lakeshore. It is a series of man-made islands built in the late 1960s and included an amusement park as Ontario’s response to Expo 66 in Montreal. It was promoted by the Province of Ontario through exhibits and was well enjoyed by families for it’s water park, children’s play area, amusement rides and concert stage. Recently, declining attendance caused the government to close most of the venues so it is mostly a park. The Ford government wants to bulldoze the site and turn it into a casino. That’s probably the worst idea possible so the Daniels faculty hosted a design competition to generate awareness of the issue.

The conceptual idea for my submission was to use glaciation as a landscape forming device to turn asphalt parking lots into a natural park with zones referencing the four types of landscapes found in Ontario: boreal forests, grasslands, lakes with islands, and rocky bluffs.

The competition was a fun experience and I learned many new skills. It was also my first landscape design project and felt like doing a self-directed second studio.

This past week the sun came out and the weather was hot so my friends and I went for a bike ride. We usually venture towards the east end of town but this time we went west to Ontario Place. Despite the closure of the venues, there is still a ton of park space and many breakwaters to hang out on.

The PODS are the most famous part of Ontario Place. Built as exhibition halls, they weren’t very commercially successful but are an excellent example of modern architecture and really quite striking.

We brought along some snacks and drinks and had a small picnic on two of the breakwaters. The sun was quite warm, as long as you weren’t in the shadows and it really felt like the beginning of spring.

I hadn’t noticed it before but the water is strikingly clear and almost turquoise. It reminds me of the Caribbean but it’d be much much colder here. At the end of the day we were treated to a spectacular sunset which made me really happy and appreciative of where I was and who I was with at that moment.