A cultural & ecological hub in the heart of the Don Valley

From 1889 to 1984 the Don Valley Brick Works was one of Canada’s pre-eminent brickyards, producing more than 43 million bricks a year. Evergreen, in partnership with the City of Toronto and the TRCA, selected a large, multi-disciplinary design team including architects, landscape architects, interpretive designers, engineers, ecologists and artists, to transform the abandoned site into an environmental education centre incorporating themes of nature, culture and community.

Led by DTAH, the team proposed the adaptive-reuse of all 16 buildings on site interconnected by new vibrant public spaces and native landscapes. The Centre for Green Cities, a new five-storey LEED Platinum building inserted on the base of a historic storage facility at the heart of the site, houses offices for Evergreen and other like-minded environmental organizations.

The team’s design strategy centered on the preservation of the site’s unique industrial past and the marriage of that history with innovative sustainable design principles. Architectural interventions demonstrate a “light touch and loose fit” approach, ensuring flexibility as programming needs change over time. Discrete interventions combine with a network of bridges and walkways to connect the buildings together, allowing landscape to penetrate the site and reconnect its industrial past with the surrounding ravine landscape.

The floodplain setting informed all aspects of the design, including raising the site by one-half metre, creating channels around the Centre for Green Cities to direct water flow, storm water ponds, an extensive native planting program, permeable paving and harvesting rainwater for reuse.