One of the fastest-growing places in North America, Vaughan, 14 miles north of Toronto, has morphed from a rural township of 16,000 people in 1960 to a sprawling suburb of 288,000 today. Now it is taking the next step'applying a layer of urban amenities onto an uninspired landscape of highways, shopping malls, and tract houses. A subway line to Toronto will open in 2015, and construction has begun on Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, a downtown district that will have apartment towers, office buildings, entertainment facilities, and pedestrian-oriented shopping.
Another important piece in this emerging urban mix is Vaughan's new city hall, a 325,000-square-foot complex that serves as both a symbolic and a practical manifestation of change. Although bordered on two sides by major arterial roads and on a third by an intercity railroad, the city hall aims to jump-start a 24-acre zone of civic activity that will eventually include a library, a chamber of commerce, public gardens, and an outdoor skating/water feature. In 2004, the Toronto-based firm Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg (KPMB) won an invited competition to design a master plan for this civic center as well as the city hall. 'We told them up front that we would break the competition rules,' says Bruce Kuwabara, the design partner for the project. 'We didn't want to design a fancy object surrounded by cars, so we told them it would be a set of buildings and have much of the parking underground.' The firm's scheme creates a campus that echoes the traditional model of Canadian towns in which city hall, public square, market, and cenotaph cluster together. It also weaves buildings and outdoor spaces into three strips of development, referencing the east-west mapping of agricultural fields in the province. 'Given the devastation of suburbia, we decided to re-till the landscape to create a new urban center,' explains Kuwabara.
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