Sugar beach
CCxA tells us about Sugar Beach, a project that transforms a former parking lot into a coastal urban landscape where sand, color, and sensory experience interact with the industrial surroundings and the lake horizon, creating an iconic public space that blends intimacy, openness, and a distinctive playful identity.
In the Fall of 1997, Waterfront Toronto launched an invited design competition to transform a derelict parking lot into an 8500 square metre public space. CCxA (formerly Claude Cormier + Associés) first response during the initial site tour was inspired by the unique possibilities offered by the site’s surrounding phenomena, particularly the operating Redpath Sugar Factory across the slip, the skyline of the Financial District, the Harbour, and the horizon of Lake Ontario accentuated by the Toronto Islands.
Mapa de contexto / Context map
Ilustración / Illustration: CCxA
As one of the first public initiatives towards the development of the East Bayfront, the expectations were high for a public space that could function at the scale of the community while becoming embedded in the public imagination. Designed by CCxA and opened in the summer of 2010, Sugar Beach has overwhelmingly surpassed all expectations, setting a baseline for future development in the precinct.
Vista de Sugar Beach / View of Sugar beach
Fotografía / Photography: Nicola Betts
This project was created to have a strong identity to become a destination that could draw visitors for an experience of the park’s unique setting of lake and city. This space embodies the tension between the extreme verticality of the city centre and the superlative horizontality of the lake horizon. Sugar Beach is a space that unites opposites, without conflating them, such that it allows for an experience of both nature and culture, work and play, production and consumption – a microcosm of the urban phenomenon where participation relies on which direction you position your beach chair and fix your gaze.
Sugar Beach is a space that unites opposites, without conflating them, such that it allows for an experience of both nature and culture, work and play, production and consumption.
Vista aérea / Aerial view
Fotografía / Photography: Industryous Photography
The details of the park, from the signature umbrellas to the subtle drop between promenade and beach, all serve to engage the park user with their surroundings. The pink of the umbrellas arouses curiosity to draw people into the space. But it also serves to amplify the presence of the sky – by contrasting against the blue, or acting as a barometer of pink dusks, or injecting playful warmth to offset cool winter greys. Even the polished underside of these parasols glow pink and mirrors the lake’s rippling reflections onto the sand beneath in the late afternoon sunlight.
Vista mostrando los arces “Jeffersred” / View showing the Jeffersred maples
Fotografía / Photography: Guillaume Paradis
The colour and texture of the raw sugar offloaded by Redpath’s gantry cranes, the process itself a captivating spectacle, is paralleled by the curiously similar colour and texture of the sand. This illusion is reinforced by the all-pervasive odour of sugar in the air. The contemporary deep-seated Muskoka Chairs, which command the body to relax, are freely distributed and movable to allow park visitors the possibility to define their views to the lake, the city, sugar tankers in the slip, or to each other.
Construcción / Construction Fotografía / Photography: CCxA
The Jeffersred Maples along the promenade, planted in a vast system of silva cells that promote tree growth to maturity, frame views to the city skyline looking north, and guide site lines to the lake horizon and Leslie Spit to the south. The maples planted in the promenade are mimicked in the granite cobble leaf patterns at their feet, further, to become the abstracted shape of the fountain splash pad. The red and white stripes on the bedrock outcrops serve as a gesture in place-making while subtly masking the quarry cut lines from the rock extraction and relocation process.
Vista de la playa con mar y barco de fondo / View of the beach with the sea and a boat in the background
Fotografía / Photography: Industryous Photography
Sugar Beach is an example of density and intimacy in a compact public setting. The positioning of objects such as the umbrellas, trees, and chairs invites an openness to sharing space without having a sense of compromised privacy. The deliberate emphasis on the phenomena surrounding the park creates an experience of universal appeal, which is fundamental to the park’s success at the metropolitan scale. Nuance in the design of the park’s elements and open-endedness in its program highlights the context to become a common denominator that unites the park’s wide diversity of users, while at the same time permitting them to discover and create pleasure and meaning for themselves.
Vista de Sugar Beach hacia el lago / View of the Sugar Beach towards the lake Fotografía / Photography: Nicola Betts
Specifications:
Client: Waterfront Toronto
Design and Project Lead Firm: CCxA
Area: 8500 m² (2 acres)
Year: 2008 — 2010
Collaboration:
The Planning Partnership (Landscape Architecture), Halsall Associates Limited (Structural Engineering), The Municipal Infrastructure Group (Site Engineering), Dillon Consulting Limited (Electrical Engineering), Éclairage Public (Lighting Design), Andrew Jones Design (Industrial Design), Aldershot Landscape Contractors (Construction).
