In Memoriam: A Reflection on Eberhard Zeidler (1926–2022) and His Legacy
An architect who gave Toronto’s built environment a timeless and aspirational form and function, inspiring 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.” As one of the nation’s most revered architects, he practiced what he preached. He produced some of the city’s best hits, from the retail scene to the hospital setting, before passing on January 7, 2022, after a nearly 70-year-long career.
As beneficiaries of his work, we carry on Zeidler’s values and create spaces for diverse groups of people to live and work together. We can wander Ontario Place, the 90-acre attraction found on Toronto’s Lake Ontario shoreline. We can explore the Union Pearson Express Station, a transit connector which links downtown Toronto and Pearson International Airport. We can visit Toronto Metropolitan University’s Student Learning Centre, a vibrant hub filled with student activity.
From 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, moreover, as containers of memories.
Although it may seem redundant to espouse the virtues of urban intensification, green initiatives, and transit-oriented development — some of today’s favourite urban planning buzzwords — Zeidler laid significant groundwork for a functional and inviting city centre. Today’s Eaton Centre exemplifies positive urban redevelopment, poised to receive a $60 million renovation.
Announced in 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 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 reinvent something as mundane and single-use as a shopping centre into a living, breathing 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.
