The Irish Experience: Building the Toronto Difference

175 years ago, the shockwave of the Irish Famine caused a deluge of refugees that landed in Toronto’s Harbour. Today, the unique Irish experience continues to make a difference in building this city. Visit Ireland Park on Eireann Quay in Toronto to have an Irish experience.

The hopeful man’s arms are raised against a backdrop of barren march trees as he faces the glistening glass and concrete towers of the Toronto waterfront that they will in due course help to build. The contrast of his riveted, gaunt face and wasting frame, his trousers held up by rope, against the concentrated affluence of Queen’s Quay, brings home the story of so many refugees who have landed in Canada, running from famine, drought, or war. Hope, the pain of leaving and the supplication before forces greater than ourselves, the victory of arrival. Gratitude and fear. A cry for help, but above all, the relief at having made it alive, barely.

Rowan Gillespie’s five bronze sculptures bear witness at Ireland Park, on Eireann Quay, and commemorates the summer of 1847, when 38,560 Irish fled the Famine to arrive in Toronto, which at that time housed only 20,000 people. Imagine your city transformed over a few months by an influx of people nearly twice your own population! This was the greatest crisis to ever face the young city of Toronto, which only 13 years earlier had changed its name to avoid the negative connotation of “muddy York.”

Ireland Park is a dramatic example of the “place-making architecture” of Jonathan Kearns, Founding Principal of Kearns Mancini Architects Inc. (KMAI). An immigrant from Ireland himself, Kearns arrived in Canada in 1975, fleeing a depressed economy – Ireland known then as the ‘sick man in Europe’ - and bringing with him the rich Irish experience that would inform his work. This experience brings a unique perspective that is helping to change how Toronto is being built today.

Kearns was relentless in place-making when he helped the Canada Ireland Foundation to find a site for Ireland Park. As he puts it, “The Foundation was determined to secure a water’s edge setting for the ‘Arrival’ group of sculptures, as water connected Ireland and Canada. The southeast corner of Bathurst Quay (now Eireann Quay) was the most appropriate location, with its unobstructed views of the Toronto’s skyline, the morning sunrise to the east, and the tranquil waters of the harbour in the foreground.”

Early experiences seem to be the cauldron in which we forge every other lifelong act that we pursue, trying to make these early obsessions and insights come alive by realizing them repeatedly. “You have to draw out the culture of a place. Be highly contextual,” says Kearns, “Draw out the strands of the local place and integrate them into the modern idiom.”

This aesthetic of responding to place was honed by Kearns’ environment and social architecture planning project in his final year of school. He focused on a remote Irish coastal community to investigate how to support the local economy by adapting the already built environment for tourism. However, he found the local people were not well-equipped to build for visitors, often misunderstanding their own assets. This forged his commitment to use “the asset of landscape” and to “get the culture right.”

The Irish experience informs how Kearns Mancini approaches all aspects of building in Canada. “In Dublin,” says Kearns, “social housing – ‘corpo’ or corporation housing – was defined by its architecture. It looked like places where people on the bottom rung of society lived, those who were socially disadvantaged. I came to Canada with a desire to create affordable housing that was indistinguishable from local housing. Once a local city councillor complained that our projects looked ‘too good,’ but I swore I would remove the stigma.”

Arriving in Canada proved to be a boon for Kearns. “The Irish approach was informal, more hands-on,” says Kearns, “you could dig into all aspects of the culture in Ireland.” And he brought that approach with him.

Developing an urban design feasibility study for 43 acres of Belfast Harbour in 1991 put Kearns’ ‘place-making’ thinking to work. This was the place where the Titanic was built. He wanted to bring Canadian investment to Belfast and build the Titanic Quarter. It was too early for Belfast, but it helped Kearns gain a greater appreciation for Toronto, which historically has had an urban and architectural kinship with Belfast, for its harbourfront warehouses. His work was realized eventually, in part, once the 1997 Titanic movie grossed over $1.84 billion (US) worldwide, the first film to reach the billion-dollar mark.

There is a direct line between Jonathan Swift’s founding of St. Patrick’s hospital in 1745, Ireland’s first psychiatric facility, and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s (CAMH) redevelopment on Queen St. West in Toronto. The connective tissue is the Irish experience of Jonathan Kearns. He worked for 7 years redeveloping St. Patrick’s in Dublin, even spending days at a time mixing with patients in the hospital. This intimate experience enabled him to assemble a winning consortium of architects for the CAMH project, once again, his focus was on eliminating stigma, making this architecture expressive of the place and people.?

"Digging deeply. Getting closer. Being personally involved. This is how we create a real difference with place-making architecture."

- Jonathan Kearns

“Digging deeply. Getting closer. Being personally involved,” says Kearns. “This is how we create a real difference with place-making architecture. It comes from personal experience, from visceral experience.”

Jonathan Kearns recruited Deborah Byrne, a recent arrival from Ireland, to become Director of Passive House Design at KMAI. Canada has been the beneficiary ever since. In her “planet-saving” Irish experience lies the future of this city and this country.

Once again, the early experiences were the most formative. Byrne recounts how every Irish kid knows the exclamation, “Turn off the immersion!” being yelled by a parent. Heat is worth more than gold in Ireland. Being an island country off the coast of Europe, Ireland has always had to be energy conscious. It has very little of its own natural energy resources and does not have access to nuclear power. The cost of electric power is incredibly expensive, previously coming from mostly hydro and peat bogs. So, when you heat water for a shower, open a window and leave a door ajar, you are labeled an energy insurrectionist from the get-go. This is seared into your being.

It was no accident that Byrne pursued civil engineering with a focus on the environment and energy.

“My structural engineering degree permitted a number of environmental engineering theses” Byrne says, “I got one of them, thankfully, on the Minimization of Energy in Transport under Professor Jerry D Murphy, renowned for over 160 peer reviewed journal papers, which places him in the top 5 internationally-cited scholars in biogas research and on a list of the most cited Civil Engineers worldwide.”

“His enthusiasm rubbed off on me and I have been as noisy and excitable about doing better for the planet ever since. He and his colleagues have put Ireland at the leading edge of renewable energy and alternative fuel research.”

"We must do the best we can for our planet and the people, so we can coexist together."

- Deborah Byrne

Byrne’s background and education have made her feel morally obligated to try to do the best she can do in our built environment because, as she says, “when we build it is inherently bad, but it is often inherently necessary for our survival; so, we must do the best we can for the planet and the people, so we can coexist together.”

This led Byrne to Passive House.

“I was invited to go to Germany to a Passive House Conference in Frankfurt and quite honestly when you are introduced to Passive House, its ideals and all the science that backs it up, it is impossible to unlearn it. It is very difficult to continue with the previous way of construction once the new way has been shown. It is hard to argue with the simplicity of it when it offers so much to the human condition. And it’s a response to the cold upbringing you’ve had watching the immersion. You have to do nothing but live comfortably for less.”

The Irish experience has created the unique mindset and aesthetics, commitments and obsessions of Kearns and Byrne. They aim to build differently for Toronto every day.

When you visit Ireland Park, the trauma and desperation of the Irish Famine seems closer, more intimate than 175 years ago. When you look at the names of those who landed in 1847 at Dr. Reese’s Wharf, near the current site of the Metropolitan Toronto Convention Centre, who are memorialized in the crevices of the limestone, they sound like the names of our friends and family. Julia Lane. William Collins. Ellen Walsh.?

When Jonathan Kearns visited the Irish quarry to select the stone, he noticed that it held the light when it was sliced at a certain angle. The Irish Blue Limestone is a captivating dark shade, carefully sourced from fossil beds featuring relics of ancient oysters found only in the Kilkenny/Carlow region of Ireland. Kearns asked for the stone to be sliced to allow the light to travel and reveal the fossils.

Not a typical Toronto park, Ireland Park is an evocative place designed consciously to create a feeling for the kind of landscape that was left behind in Ireland – a bare and craggy western landscape comprising poor agricultural land on which the Irish tenant farmers could only subsist by growing potatoes in the smallest of fields.?

Yet, claiming ground on Eireann Quay today, Ireland Park reflects all who come here to make a life and build a city.

When Canada achieved confederation status in 1867, the Irish were the second largest national contingent in the country after the French. Ireland is truly a founding nation of Canada, and it continues to be. The Irish experience of the ‘place-making’ and ‘planet-saving’ Kearns and Byrne are building this country today.