In Memoriam: A Reflection of Eberhard Zeidler (1926–2022) and His Legacy From Architecture Student and Toronto Waterfront Resident
In memory of an architect who gave Toronto’s built environment a timeless and aspirational form and function, inspiring fellow citizens, practitioners, and students
“The city isn’t just an artistic element but [one] that it is full of life,” remarked Eberhard Zeidler in a 1998 interview with the Canadian Urban Institute. “You have to understand [it] before you can work within it.” True to form, one of the nation’s most revered architects practiced exactly what he preached, and to great effect through this design ideology, before concluding a well-decorated, 70-year-long profession.
Before passing away this month on January 7, 2022, he would leave Toronto’s cultural and institutional fabric richer and brighter, producing some of Canada’s best hits from the retail scene to the hospital setting. Left with a tremendous legacy, the city of Toronto, the international community, and I bid a heartfelt farewell to, but a warm appreciation of, an architectural visionary and force, responsible for many of our cherished urban and waterfront landmarks.
As beneficiaries of his work, we carry on with Zeidler’s creative and critical spirit of reconciling what has passed and what is yet to come. Gifted with a national identity and design language through his architecture, we now live on with Ontario Place, the Eaton Centre, and the Hospital for Sick Children, among many other distinguished projects, as crucial civic and cultural contributions for which we are forever grateful for.
From wandering through the monumental vaulted glass roof structure of the cathedral-like Eaton Centre to walking around the expansive grounds of Ontario Place — home to the world’s first permanent IMAX theatre — Zeidler’s designs rendered the downtown core and the post-industrial waterfront as both art and performance; as stages for life and as containers of memories.
During his extensive career, he delivered unabashed avant-garde, yet instrumental user-centric, forms with each of his designs. Yet decades on from their conception, it is evident that his professional practice was as much invested in the sense of aesthetic adventure and that of sustainable planning within the city.
Although it may periodically seem redundant to espouse the virtues of urban intensification, green initiatives, and transit-oriented development — as per some of today’s favourite urban planning buzzwords — Zeidler yet laid significant groundwork for a functional and inviting city centre. Operating and thriving on the aforementioned, today’s Eaton Centre exemplifies such positive urban redevelopment, now poised to receive a $60 million renovation.
Announced as of a matter of days following his passing, the investment, led by none other than Zeidler Architecture, can be viewed as both a thoughtful and a symbolic tribute to his overarching legacy. Starting with the Eaton Centre as a highly visited and intimately admired fixture by many — well enjoyed by tourists and locals alike — it is important to recognize that Zeidler managed to at once reinvent something as mundane and single-use as a shopping centre in to essentially a beautiful and inviting organism.
Full of life, spanning an entire block between two major streets, the structure anchors and animates its surroundings, resembling an interior boulevard in and of itself. Adept at incorporating substantial technical components, Zeidler’s glorious atrium structure, moreover, set not only a precedent for what commercial architecture could be but also the tone for strong strategies around optimal occupant comfort and efficiency within a mixed-use framework.
“In healthcare, [Zeidler] transformed the notion of the machine hospital into a healing environment,” states a recent release from Zeidler Architecture. “He took labyrinth corridors and transformed them into an open system with natural light, green spaces, and settings for communal gathering.” As the pandemic climate continues, it is with particular praise and admiration that his best efforts have yet truly come to life through his progressive, patient-centred approach to hospital design.
Historically, where most typical hospital configurations and designs have largely underserved the experiences and the welfare of those in their most vulnerable state, Zeidler pioneered a holistic healthcare experience from a humanist perspective. At the centre of his hospital designs was a mandate to administer natural daylight and ample spacing, which would magnificently culminate in his signature atrium.
Far from the care of hospitals, Toronto’s beloved Ontario Place is in many ways itself an essential caregiver and frontline provider of outdoor recreation, nostalgic exploration, and cultural capital. Altogether, it is an engineering marvel, a landscape intervention, and an entertainment venue all wrapped up in one spot that curiously, yet elegantly, straddles wet and dry conditions, expressed in an avant-garde, modernist, and Bauhaus-inspired form.
Globally, it is truly a unique project and experience to behold and to enjoy. Yet as we continually search for ways to offset increasing indoor confinement and isolation, Ontario Place need not explain itself and its virtues as an excellent answer to an appetite for sprawling and inviting green space and democratic waterfront access.
While his work has had tremendous international reach, with offices established in Berlin and Beijing, it is truly his career on Canadian soil that has left an enduring mark, beyond the individual building envelope. Collectively, through his public interventions, he protected and projected some of the best programs and conditions that a city could ask for, delivered from an architectural order of integrity, civility, and sustainability.
As far away from a top-down planning approach, Eberhard Zeidler has demonstrated a resounding community service to the public. What is left is a tasteful sense of technological optimism and innovation, an appreciation for the importance of site specificity, and the willingness to build for the common good.
