Beltline Yards

A Masterplan in the making

Hullmark, together with BGO, is pleased to unveil its masterplan for Beltline Yards – a distinct, mixed-use, community-driven neighbourhood set to become a landmark destination in Toronto's Castlefield Design District.

Learn more about our vision, the architecture, and the unique landscape of the Beltline Trail.

Rendering of Beltline Yards with neighborhoods in the foreground

Designing Beltline Yards

→Explore our design process

The spaces between the buildings

A conversation with Allies & Morrison

Designing B.Y.

The spaces between the buildings

How London architecture practice Allies & Morrison are designing a new Toronto neighbourhood, brick by brick.

In conversation with Alfredo Caraballo, Angie Jim Osman, and Dinka Beglerbegovic.

Bricks are one of the few materials that get better with age. “Bricks have more solidity, more longevity,” says Alfredo Caraballo, one of three architects designing the masterplan of Beltline Yards. “They’re built to last.”

In a way, you could look at bricks as a reflection of the design ambition at Beltline Yards. They’re incredibly long-lasting, for one. For two, they feel crafted in a way that other building materials don’t. “The unit of a brick is very in tune with craft,” says Caraballo’s colleague, Angie Jim Osman. “It feels very human. With modern systems like window walls, you don’t have that same tangible character.”

To this team of architects, a city, like a well-made piece of clothing, is something that should be mindfully stitched together. The use of bricks stitches Beltline Yards into the fabric of the city by echoing its industrial heritage, reminding us of an earlier spirit of Toronto. Before it was a city of glass and metal, it was a city of bricks. “We are very precious about details and how cities are put together,” says Caraballo. “We spend a lot of time crafting spaces while we’re designing buildings, we’re very conscious of how they sit within the city.”

At Beltline Yards, the idea of stitching things together applies not just to brick buildings, but to the spaces in between. The landscape-led approach of Allies & Morrison gives its inhabitants diverse public spaces to choose from, with tucked-away pockets and wide open spaces, each offering different uses for people of all ages. Working hand in hand with SvN in the landscape strategy, the team carefully composed a sequence of spaces, paying attention both at the shape of the spaces and the uses that will happen in them.

For example, in the park situated at the heart of the site, an old smokestack preserved on the site sits beside a new amphitheatre. The amphitheatre offers local employees a space to catch some rays during their lunch break or for the community to come together for open-air cinema. Ultimately, it’s up to them. That’s inherently what Allies & Morrison’s approach is about: creating flexible public spaces and letting the community decide how they want to use them. It’s about moving away from the purpose-built to something more nuanced, something that responds to history, context and people.

BY051The Beltline Trail will come to life with active frontages along its leafy edges. The exact retail mix is open-ended, but the plan is for these to be shops that relate to the trail, like a bike rental or a running store.

"The character is in the activity."

– Dinka Beglerbegovic

The smokestack next to the amphitheatre, on the other hand, brings us back to the idea of stitching together Toronto past and present. One of the architects on the project conducted a vast survey of Toronto’s industrial vernacular, which became the inspiration for the architectural character of Beltline Yards. “The proportions, the informality of the windows, the rhythm, the roof profiles, the oversized doors made for cars and the little doors made for people – we took from that very carefully,” says Jim Osman. “The informality of the industrial character was very much taken on board.”

In their many trips to Toronto, the London-based architects observed that Toronto is a city built around making. Although much of that industry was pushed further and further outside the city, at Beltline Yards it has remarkably stayed put. Allies & Morrison’s masterplan does more than maintain the area’s long-standing industry, it celebrates it. Beltline Yards welcomes making back into the urban neighbourhood, reimagining what Toronto can and should be in the 21st century.

The spirit of making at Beltline Yards will be felt beyond just the architecture. “The character is in the activity,” says Dinka Beglerbegovic. “It’s how the spaces in between are activated, by the makers spilling out into the covered yard. These informal collaborations, exhibitions, markets, and deliveries – all the processes involved with manufacturing – all these activities overlap, and that’s quite unique.”

BY005Open air cinema amphitheatre in the new park featuring the retained brick chimney.

BY138Architectural model by Allies & Morrison

The Beltline Trail

→Learn more about Toronto's Green Corridor

Sowing Seeds

A conversation with landscape architects SvN

INTERVIEW

Sowing Seeds

How the landscape architects SvN are stitching together the industrial with the organic, the past and the present, the potential and the unknown.

In conversation with: Drew Sinclair, Jonathan Tinney, Gerardo Paez

The Beltline Trail is a tricky one to define. It’s a long, urban trail, but because of the city’s rapid growth, it’s broken into smaller segments. The former railway is a magnificent piece of urban renewal, but it’s unfinished. It’s an absolute asset for those who live nearby, but not enough of a draw for those who don’t.

“The Beltline has for a longtime had this potential to connect east-west across the city through a priority transportation corridor, meaning its priority is not moving cars but moving people,” says SvN principal Drew Sinclair. “Where its potential hasn’t been fully realized is where these key gaps exist.”

For SvN, a landscape design, architecture and planning practice, this truth about the Beltline Trail formed a significant piece of the puzzle in designing the landscapes at Beltline Yards: How to stitch together new buildings with an existing green space? And how to improve a part of that green space in a way that catalyzes future improvements beyond the boundaries of the site? And so the story of the Beltline Yards and its landscapes becomes one of connection: connecting what Beltline Yards will be with the potential of what the Beltline Trail could become.

BY098Bringing the Beltline in...

“Where its potential hasn’t been fully realized is where these key gaps exist. If you can fill them in, you can create this superconnecting loop for the first time.”

– Drew Sinclair, SvN

The potential? An urban trail that forms a full loop through Toronto, connecting the many neighbourhoods it touches. Speaking with SvN, it’s clear the opportunity for Beltline Yards is to lead by example by creating a landscape-led masterplan that seamlessly flows between trail and neighbourhood.

“The trail is something quite different from Beltline Yards,” Sinclair continues. “The trail is a linear public space that’s about movement, it’s not serving an industrial purpose. The way we’ve been able to navigate between those two design languages is to imagine the industrial underlay and the organic overlay.” So for example, the industrial underlay might be something like a playground, designed to echo the language of 19th century industry and railroads. Or the brick chimney, standing next to an amphitheatre in the park, a relic of the past that will be embraced as a wayfinding landmark for Beltline Yards.

To get a better understanding of the organic overlay, on the other hand, meet Gerardo Paez, the soft spoken landscape architecture lead at SvN who designed the landscapes to simultaneously provide intimacy and create expansiveness. He paints a picture of wildflower meadows, open lawns and quiet moments among the trees that provide a varied environment for the community, while also creating a natural transition between trail and neighbourhood. “We wanted a place that’s flexible enough to kick a ball with a toddler or read a book on a bench, but also to have an event with different members of the community,” he says.

BY115Sketch showing the transition from trail to public pavilion and park

To create that sense of variety, Paez and his team are planning small groves of birch, trembling aspens, white pines and evergreens. The exact plant species and placement are still being determined, but the vast majority will be local Ontarian species, selected to enhance biodiversity and cater to four- and six-legged neighbours as well as the usual two-legged ones. Ultimately, the ambition is to create clusters of trees that bloom and change colour with the seasons, letting the people of Beltline Yards enjoy their gardens any time of year.

“My own walks in the morning are along a park and that keeps me connected and grounded,” says Paez. “It’s just a beautiful sensation of serenity. And that’s what we’re trying to get at with the planting scheme at Beltline Yards.”