The winning entry through an invited international design competition, Sugar Beach takes its queue from the adjacent Redpath Sugar Factory, source of the noteworthy sugar spray frequently carried by westerly breezes onto the site. Sweetness is here manifested through colour - candy-coloured umbrellas across a sandy wedge of beach, and bedrock outcrops patterned after rock candy. Integrating the future Waterfront Promenade and a plaza for programmed and unprogrammed events, the design for Sugar Beach playfully adopts some of the most enduring elements from Toronto's emerging landscape identity - its beaches, trees,and water - embedding them into the urban horizon with a trace mood of the city's industrial past.
Sugar Beach is the second urban beach proposed for Toronto’s downtown waterfront, and the latest addition to the amber necklace of Toronto’s lakefront beachscape. It is a sequel to HtO, the waterfront’s first beach park. The proposal for Jarvis Slip playfully recomposes other signature elements of the city, with Toronto playing the role as its own design precedent. The omnipresent horizon of the lake and adjacent industrial buildings recalls Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884). Tinted by sugar spray carried on westerly breezes from the neighboring Redpath Sugar Factory, a series of hard rock candies with colored stripes and dozens of pink umbrellas are scattered across a sandy wedge of beach along the Jarvis Slip. Integrating the future Waterfront Promenade, along with a plaza for programmed and unprogrammed events, the design playfully adopts some of the most enduring elements from Toronto’s emerging landscape identity—beaches, bedrock, trees, and water—as well as the urban horizon and a trace of the city’s past industrial mood.
