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Continuing its creative work along the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, the non-profit organization, The Bentway has opened Bentway Staging Grounds, a new offsite project. The project is presented in a previously vacant 1,858-m2 (20,000-sf) space at Dan Leckie Way and Lake Shore Boulevard and acts as a living laboratory.
A collaborative team from Agency—Agency, NYC, and SHEEEP Toronto, has designed this public meeting place for community, culture, and ecology. The project is located two blocks east of The Bentway’s iconic Skate Trail and steps from the waterfront.
The organization worked with the design team and engineers, Buro Happold, to redeploy the Gardiner’s downspout drainage system, redirecting rainwater runoff through natural filtration chambers to feed experimental gardens.
Isaac Crosby (also known as “Brother Nature”), a local Afro-Indigenous (Ojibwe) horticultural expert, helped select native plant species (e.g. milkweed, agastache, and yarrow) that will absorb pollutants such as salt and heavy metals, to help remediate excess water. Colourful didactic signage and onsite branding was designed by Neil Donnelly Studio. Visitors are invited to explore the project through a network of walkways and built-in benches, raised over the site’s existing bed of river rocks.
A series of 6.1-m (20-ft) tall “art towers” provide visual and acoustic buffers from the adjacent active street, Lake Shore Boulevard. In a series of artworks commissioned for the towers, Toronto-based artist Logan MacDonald presents the first one with his piece, Fountain Monumental—a reflection on the site’s relationship with water, creatively collaborating with digital tools to challenge the notion of historical accuracy and authorship. MacDonald’s canvases prompt viewers to imagine a decolonial future and what the ancient shoreline of Lake Ontario might look like today if it had been preserved differently.
Bentway Staging Grounds is an interim intervention that will remain in place until the City of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway Rehabilitation work commences in the area—currently scheduled for late 2025. Nearly all elements of Staging Grounds were selected for their ability to be repurposed after the project’s completion.
“It’s a privilege working with The Bentway on Staging Grounds, to think creatively about the city’s infrastructure, and to center the design of water in the public’s daily experience,” says Tei Carpenter of Agency—Agency.
“We’re really excited to share this project with the city and to see how an underutilized part of our infrastructure can be actively and passively used throughout the year,” says Reza Nik of SHEEEP.
