The landscape architect Claude Cormier visits Berczy Park in Toronto, which his 2017 office has redesigned.Alex Bozikovic/The Globe and Mail
Claude Cormier was a genius. He was unique. These are clichés, but they are true – from Mr. Cormier, the landscape architect of Montreal and his work, who died in 2023.
He was one of the greatest designers that Canada has ever produced. How can we protect his workplace? And what can our cities learn from him?
Mr. Cormier had rooms for 15 years that people bring together. He and his company CCXA created Montreals Clock Tower Beach and most of the best youngest parks in Toronto. You may not know his name, but you probably saw the pink umbrellas of Torontos Sugar Beach, the huge ring on the village of Ville-Marie in Montreal or the lipstick bench in Love Park, where the torontonians gather around a large heart-shaped pond.
There are places to sit in his parks. There are shadows. There are usually large trees. There is something to see – a colorful spectacle that can be valued among other people. Cormier's work provided these basics (which are often neglected) as well as technical expertise and a great shot of joke.
In this winter, the designers and supporters of Toronto urge to recognize the performance area and to protect the places he created.
An event during the Daulto Festival in February brought colleagues and landscape architecture experts to discussion together with oral history, which were created by the cultural landscape foundation.
“He gave us permission to be a little wild and a little promiscuitive at the right moment,” said one of the discussion participants, the planner and ecologist Nina-Marie Lister. “He often said to us”Loosen! 'The result was an obligation for the public joy of being freedom to be as they are. “
Only a few landscape architects deserve such a poetic vocabulary. But that was Cormier: endlessly energetic, completely extroverted and a fountain of ideas. He grew up on a farm in Quebec, loved plants and loved cities alike. In Montreal, Toronto and in his studies in Harvard, he acquired an arsenal of intellectual and aesthetic tools.
In one of the interview videos, Cormier describes himself as the love child by Frederick Law Olmsted and Martha Schwartz. One parent was the famous father of the American landscape architecture, whose faux-natural landscapes served the working people of the city from the 19th century. The other is a mischievous postmodernist who started with a garden with sculptures from Bagels in the 1980s.
Cormians go together. His parks always had a great idea. In Toronto, he took a location on the water where a sugar -refinerie was exposed and created sugar beach: a park that was interrupted by pink, with sweets colored umbrellas. He added a piece of corner to the Canadian sign and a Gait from trees, stroll through visitors like on a catwalk. And as always chairs and benches. This became an urban place that is pleasant, but also to remember and speak something.
Cormier loved people. He wanted to bring them together to chat, flirt and laugh. A third influence on his work was William H. Whyte, the American observer of public space. Cormier used Whytes concept of the “triangulation” – a focus that gives people to see something, and a common experience that can combine.
For example: the dog phone. Mr. Cormier and his colleagues, including Marc Hallé, stood on the renovation of downtown Torontos Berczy Park from a small park in which many neighbors liked their dogs. When they borrow from the landscape design of the 19th century, they created an ornamental fountain but instead of statues of cherubs or birds, these ceramic dogs spit water in the middle. They fought against the idea of the idea of some neighbors and some employees of the city. After completion, he said in a video: “It became this amazing choreography.”
How can you keep the dance going?
Cormier and CCXA for Toronto, a “cat park” in the Wellington Street, are designed for the “dog park”, and this should be built. In the meantime, their existing landscapes require special attention. About a dozen are installed in Toronto. This week in Sugar Beach I found one of the umbrellas of this park-that actually tailor-made devices. I asked the city about it; The spokesman Alexandra Dinsmore said that these umbrellas “a defined feature of Toronto's rushing promenade” are fully repaired in spring.
Excellent. But that cannot be dependent. In Toronto, where the parking department is consistently bad to maintain unusual elements, they are in danger. Michael McClelland, a director of the Architects of the Heritage company ERA, suggests private preservation a private non-profit organization that can provide intellectual and financial support. “With Claude's Parks, there are very specific concerns about ceramics and other materials that require specific maintenance,” he said. “We have to be ahead of the game and create a strategy.”
Charles Birnbaum, head of the cultural landscape foundation, repeated this call. “I think his work here is a great collection of artistic works and deserves a nature reserve,” said Birnbaum. “He didn't talk about himself in this way, but Claude was an artist.”
Indeed. And while Cormier is gone, his narrow -known team at CCXA conducts his legacy with new projects. “We are explorers,” said CCXA partner Guillaume Paradis at the Toronto event. “We collect ingredients from all over the world, from the places in which we are involved – the cultural peculiarities, the ecosystems – and there is a tension when these elements come together on the chase paper. If we feel a spark, we say: “” It is there. “
This magic is difficult to reproduce. However, the simpler aspects of the Cormier method are not; They are the recipe of every good big city park over the past two centuries. Seats, including movable chairs. Shadow. Water where possible. Plants that are well selected and protected in well -defined zones.
These things are missing over and over again in contemporary city parks in Canada.
Not every public space can be shaped by a charming, idiosyncratic artist such as Mr. Cormier. But we can honor his legacy by placing places where people can gather to be together, in physical consolation and, if we are lucky, to see their spirits through a joke.