"Architecture has graver ends: capable of the sublime..."
— Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier's seminal 1931 publication, Towards a New Architecture, celebrated Canada's Great Lakes grain elevators as heroic architectural achievements exemplified by Thunder Bay's 'Pool 6', which was then the world's largest.

Excerpt from Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture

The City of Thunder Bay has begun an ambitious project of converting its industrial waterfront to public trails, parks and villages. This era of transformation – predicated on embracing the waterfront as an amenity – has also seen the removal of some of its heroic industrial legacy embodied in the massive structures that line the shores of Lake Superior.

The Iron Ore Dock (IOD) is one such structure; designed by C.D. Howe and built in 1944, it stands today, overlooking Thunder Bay's 'Sleeping Giant' peninsula. Engaging these heroic and historic structures as permanent elements in a waterfront park network offers a remarkable opportunity for a reinvigorated community identity.

Embedded in a 'working' waterfront – IOD Park fuses dichotomous elements into a new composite of mega structure/meadow, wetland/theatre, forest/acrobatic school, fish habitat/music hall, bird nesting/outdoor cinema, phyto-remediation lab/water park, and northern spirit sanctuary/zip line course.

Team Members:
Calvin Brook, Anne McIlroy, Rajko Jakovic, Victoria Taylor, Stacy Anderson, Paul Gorrie, Tsugumi Kanno, Zhongwei Shi, Amrit Phull, Sanford Riley, Shawna Bowen, Tsenye Ing, Jana Joyce, Jessica Hawes, Linda Dervishaj, Matt Reid, Blair Scorgie, Nooshin Talebiani, Marta Sitek, Judy Sanz-Sole, Morteza Behrooz, Georgia Brook, Rochelle Haw

Collaborators:
Mike Lalich (photographer), Paul Morralee (videographer), Benjamin Brook (videography), Derek Ledoux (sound designer), Ken Johnson, Arc-Design (trough sculptor/fabricator)

Special Acknowledgments:
John Twigg (Northern Wood), Chief Hay and the City of Thunder Bay Fire Department Kathy Ball, Katherine Dugmore, Gary Wood (City Of Thunder Bay)

Brook McIlroy

Brook McIlroy was founded on the ambition to create a truly multi-disciplinary practice to address the complex and interrelated challenges of contemporary city building. Our office combines practices in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and planning into an integrated studio based in downtown Toronto.

Recent projects include waterfronts in Toronto, Thunder Bay, Windsor and Montenegro; Parc Downsview Park National Urban Park (Toronto); The Gardiner Expressway Transformation project; Jarvis Street Transformation and over a dozen campus projects for universities across Canada and the United States.

Recognizing the profound impact our cities, buildings and landscapes have on the global environment, Brook McIlroy proactively integrates sustainable development into all projects and the workplace.

brookmcilroy.com

Brook McIlroy,
Windsor Peace Beacon, Windsor, Ontario, 2007.
Photography: Brook McIlroy Urban Design + Planning.

Brook McIlroy,
Pool 6 Implosion Sequence, 2000.
Photography: Brook McIlroy Urban Design + Planning.

The collaborative work of T&T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano) includes mixed media based installation that combines innovative, survivalist modes of living with ecologically sound principles via modified vehicle parts and custom built shed-like shelters. It is an unlikely union that proposes a brand of utopian architecture aligned with social change.

T&T abandon independence and personal control over the outcome of images in favor of co-creation in order to create the potential for the production of an almost infinite variety of unexpected results, forms, and associative meanings. Their complimentary aesthetic sensibilities, sense of playfulness and humour combined with their shared interest in graphically representing and building prototypes for sustainable architecture enables them to work together toward similar ends.

The results of their ongoing collaborative process has lead to the creation of ideas and possibilities relating to hybridized forms of art and architecture explored in the scale models they have prepared for Redux Park.

T&T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano)

T&T (a.k.a. Tyler Brett and Tony Romano) have been working collaboratively for the past decade. During this time, T&T have "cobbled together their own vision of an ecologically sound and socially harmonious future landscape. Suspending us in the present between the past and the future, childhood and adulthood, reality and fiction, T&T locates a heterotopia sustained by imagination, innovation and play" (excerpt from Patrik Andersson, Onward Future, Exhibition Catalogue, Oakwood Gallery and Museum London, 2008).

Graduates of Emily Carr Instituteof Art + Design, Vancouver, they currently live and work in Bruno, Saskatchewan and Toronto, Ontario, respectively. They have exhibited their work internationally and are represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery (Toronto) and Trapp Editions (Vancouver).

T&T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano), Tree Raft.

T&T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano), Fishing Hut Proposal.

T&T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano), Treehouse Collective.