Toronto Star

Life may be a beach, but that doesn't mean the waterfront should be, too. So when the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. announced last week that a proposal by Montreal landscape architect Claude Cormier called Sugar Beach had won a design competition for the foot of Jarvis St., it was clear something is rotten down on the shores of Lake Ontario. Cormier is one of the most brilliant practitioners in the world today, but this doesn't rank among his better projects. For a start, a beach is all wrong for a site just metres from a noisy, polluting, stinky sugar refinery. For another, Cormier's scheme rips off his earlier design for the HtO urban beach that opened on the waterfront last year. But, the TWRC brain trust would argue, the decision was made by an expert jury assembled for the purpose. Therein lies the problem; the four-member panel was made up largely of insiders. The chair, for example, Toronto architect Siamak Hariri, belongs to the waterfront design review board as does another jury member, local architect Peter Clewes. Hariri and Cormier worked together on HtO, along with a second competitor, Toronto landscape architect Janet Rosenberg, also a member of the board.