Toronto is no stranger to rebranding its neighbourhoods. The once-industrial area known as Liberty Village is now filled with condos, exercise studios and prime brunch spots. And Bruce Mau Design recently helped create the city’s new Canary District, a former industrial hub currently acting as the athletes’ village for the Pan Am Games before becoming a residential area.
A similar transformation is underway in the Lakeshore East district, evidenced by Toronto architecture and design firm Raw Design‘s latest Raw Canvas event.
Raw hosted hundreds of young Torontonians at two old warehouse spaces near the waterfrontin the city’s east end and invited dozens of artists to cover the walls, floors and ceilings of the 30,000-square-foot space with murals and art installations.
The annual Canvas party has always been an opportunity for the firm to bring attention to its current client projects, and this time around Raw was able to highlight their work for the Daniels Corporation’s City of the Arts development – a repurposing of a swath of the waterfront as an arts and culture hub, creating space for businesses as well as residents looking for an “arts-inspired” lifestyle.
Raw project architect Carsten Liesenberg, who has been working on the City of Arts project since 2012, says the development site will become the “gateway” to a new “east bayfront community.”
“This site for the party… it’s almost a metaphor for what’s happening to Lakeshore East,” says Elmira Yousefi, another Raw project architect. “It’s going from this stark industrial space… into this vibrant community where there’s a lot of art and architecture and people involved in designing and building it.”
The new site “had to attract people from the creative community,” Yousefi said. “We also want to create a space and a project that is going to appeal to a future demographic, which will hopefully be a good strong arts community.”
