The Oculus (1958)

The Oculus (1958)

Architect: Alan Crossley
Engineer: Laurence Cazaly
Landscape architects: Dunnington-Grubb and Stensson

From an architectural walk led by Christie Pearson for Urbanvessel and riverMOUTH

So what was the experience when you arrived here in 1958? So we're talking about coming up from the Lakeshore in your car, parking your car next to the sewage treatment plant, walking around the sewage treatment plant and seeing how powerful and modern it was. And then there were no trails.

There were no paved pathways and all of this as we've come down here, all of this was rolling green. And to imagine this pavilion within a massive lawn is a bit hard right now because it's so dense, but you could see the river and you might want to take a little walk around behind — the river's quite close, but you can't tell it's so close here.

All of this hillside was a sculpted green lawn and the pavilion was very much a high modern vision of the perfect object in the landscape. Alan Crossley is the architect. The engineer is Laurence Cazaly, who was a highly innovative cutting-edge reinforced concrete engineer.

I'm going to pass around as I'm talking one of the architectural drawings because it's so lovely. Where you can see something that is hard to perceive from down here, which is the exquisite folded shape of the roof. The asymmetry of what we have in here. This is a very dynamic and asymmetrical composition.

The paving is part of the project — everything, as in a good modern building, is pulled out so that we can see the structural elements, separate the functions. What is holding up the roof are these elegant steel thin columns. The paving is its own element. The roof itself almost defies gravity — the amount of cantilever, especially on this side. And it's only structurally possible by a profound fold at the top in the slab and a lot of steel in the slab as well. And then this part here behind you, as part of the composition contained a men's and women's bathroom and then a janitor's room. The program for this [building] was a comfort station, a space for comfort and refuge: toilets, and then to get out of the rain.

I always call this my favorite building in Toronto. And it's my favorite building in a way, because of its elegant purposeful purposelessness. It has a function, but what you could do here is unscripted.

The landscape architecture is essential to understanding this building too. And it's the landscape architects' work here on this vast park that is now very much invisible. Without that landscaping, this piece is an oddity you see on your bike ride as you're racing up the Humber. It's like, what is that thing? Why is it here? How am I supposed to make sense of it?

The washrooms haven't worked for 40 years or something. The city doesn't maintain it. We have this embarrassingly underfunded parks and recreation department here, which is part of that. But then also a little bit of willful neglect. I think that last summer they touched up the rebar that was starting to get exposed. They touched up the concrete. They said they were going to recreate the washrooms, make them functional again, but never got around to it or ran out of money. All they really did is clean up the paving, remove some graffiti and then did repair on the roof. And I think that's a shame for something that's so notable as this.

To put it in context, Toronto Island is dotted with similar era pavilions. Which are these folded concrete roof pavilions which are built at around the same time as this. And were part of this explosion of excitement about architecture and modern architecture in Toronto. Then [in 1958], the competition for the Toronto city hall is about to happen.

A lot of things are going on here, but this is a really exquisite and rare example of a pure modern pavilion that we can see here in the city. It's a shame that it's neglected and not really known.

Since the 1980s, as the conservation authorities started to get rolling, ecological conservation started to become more on the menu. And it's in the 1980s where we get the reforestation of this park as a project — lawns are now out. The, the other significant part of this landscaping was a donation of 76,000 tulip bulbs. And there was a slope down there which was completely planted in tulips. You've never seem a tulip here? I think that you can imagine in your mind the view. There's big trees, but mostly it's a pavilion set in a green and it's meant to be circled around. And part of the reason it's safe is that it can be circled around.

So if you walk around the back now you can see how different [it is], [it's become] the ad hoc bathroom. We're incredibly close to the river and it's the naturalization that we want, but it's also a derelict space that invites vandalism, which is the main problem and why these bathrooms never get open. I think that's a poor excuse.

[The pavilion] They cleaned it up a lot. But I wish they did the functional wash room, you know, that'd be so great...It's a very short trip to the river... Do you wanna go? Yeah. Okay. Let's go!