Bruce Kuwabara
OAA RAIC Associate AIA
Founding Partner, KPMB
Toronto: a 21st century Ourtopia?

Is Toronto a model for a 21st century ‘Ourtopia’? The notion of a Utopia implies an unattainable ideal while “Ourtopia” implies an inclusive, pluralistic and attainable vision. The critical mass of Cultural Renaissance projects in Toronto is already realizing numerous dreams which together are shaping a culturally vital and diverse city.
Through the lens of selected projects by KPMB – the Gardiner Museum, the Young Centre, and the new home for the Toronto International Film Festival Group – Kuwabara will discuss strategies and emerging models of urbanization and sustainability that are transforming Toronto into a civil society: heterogeneous, open, and tolerant. He will argue that while it is Toronto’s supergrid of arterial streets and neighbourhoods that makes Toronto ‘work’, the city is the most healthy and vital when it embraces the local and the global. Toronto today is a broad cultural experiment that is demonstrating a positive direction not only for Canada, but for urban societies of the 21st century.

Bruce Kuwabara is a founding partner of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects and the 2006 recipient of the RAIC Gold Medal for Architecture. He studied architecture at the University of Toronto. Upon graduation he joined the studio of George Baird, an architect and theorist who was influential to Kuwabara’s interest in urban revitalization and the history of the city. In 1975 he joined Barton Myers Associates where he worked for over 12 years and as an associate led high profile design competitions for Phoenix City Hall in Arizona. During this time he explored ideas of creating civic landscapes and building the public realm that he would later further evolved in projects with KPMB, including the winning scheme for Kitchener City Hall. These core principles continue to inform his work, and are most recently evidenced in his work on several of Toronto’s cultural renaissance projects, including the Celia Franca Centre for Canada’s National Ballet School (a joint venture with Goldsmith Borgal & Company), the Gardiner Museum renewal, and the new home for the Toronto International Film Festival Group.