Canoe Landing Park is an innovative eight-acre urban park centrally located in a brownfield site in downtown Toronto’s former Railway Lands. In a unique collaboration between a landscape architect and an artist, the design of this urban park was focused on the theme of symbolic Canadian landscapes and an abstraction of the National Library collection. Programmatically, the park needed to create a social heart for the new City Place community as well as accomodate the needs of two future adjacent schools.

Dramatic, folded land forms define the park and create a green gateway that rises above the Gardiner Expressway at the western entry to downtown Toronto. In addition, several engaging public art installations by Douglas Coupland are woven into the subspaces of the park. The result is an expressive, richly textured and flexibly functioning design that creats a meaningful experience for the users

Photos by Paul Orenstein