A steel-and-glass canopy complements lightweight stairs to the park. Photo © Doublespace Photography

The towers’ nearly identical appearance masks a major structural difference: one side of the north tower sits over the rail tracks. There are no columns below the sixth floor. As when standing on one leg, it is lateral loading—sway from the wind—that is most difficult to deal with in this situation. Though outriggers near the building’s top limit this movement, a cable system with incorporated springs helps maintain the right amount of tension in the glazing at the base as the tower sways. This leaves the north tower’s lobbies extra open. Travertine facing on the elevator banks seems to glow in the daylight, and floor-to-ceiling backlit artworks by the painter Steve Driscoll literally do. In the south tower, his depiction of a pine forest rendered in red resonates with the CIBC logo.

The larger urban agenda of CIBC Square is to help reconnect downtown Toronto to its waterfront. The towers’ sites seemed cursed with infrastructural blight; they were occupied by a parking lot and an aging bus terminal. The train tracks, an elevated expressway, a sudden grade change, and the congested tangle of Union Station itself all stood between office workers and a harbor-front stroll. (Half of the south tower’s podium houses the relocated bus terminal, which Bettison says is “designed along the lines of a small regional airport.”) A leap of imagination will be needed for Torontonians to see that they can, in fact, walk straight down to Lake Ontario. WilkinsonEyre’s canopies and stairs combine with a spindly Santiago Calatrava–designed galleria, completed in the early 1990s, jutting over the sidewalk to constitute a series of lightweight features punctuating the view down Bay Street, over the tracks, and toward the lake. We will have to wait until summer to see if people pick up on the signals and throng this way to the boardwalk.

CIBC Square is Toronto’s first test of the strategy of suturing its infrastructural wounds with rail-deck parks, and it signals the difficulty of pulling off the procedure. Due to the height required to surmount the train tracks, the park may function more as a destination than as a connection. It is simply too many steps up and down, when going under or around are also options. Bettison notes that other pedestrian bridges WilkinsonEyre has designed have been about 50 feet from the ground, but this one is 30 feet higher: “It would have been a lot easier without such a big level change.” Bettison observes that the investment required to plant a park on a bridge was only worthwhile because the client owned land on both sides of the tracks; the payoff will continue for generations. CIBC Square’s park—a privately owned public space—faces open skies to both the east and the west, and it is unlikely that a building will go up to block the light. If plans to green the roof of the adjacent train shed come to fruition, one side of the park will overlook a small sea of green. Even now, other banks’ headquarters surround the site at a comfortable distance. Once they start hopping the tracks, Bay Street’s southern migration will be accomplished.

Image courtesy WilkinsonEyre

Image courtesy WilkinsonEyre

Image courtesy WilkinsonEyre