Curvy Towers Help Turn Mississauga Hayfield into a Downtown

Growing up: Curvy towers help Mississauga turn a hayfield into a downtown

From the Toronto Star

Architects like creating big sexy things. And they like to do them in big sexy cities. So now that Mississauga arguably has the biggest sexiest pair of buildings in the world, it figures the rest of its downtown should follow.

“Mississauga is not Paris, yet,” says Attila Burka. His firm, Burka Architects, partnered to create Absolute World, often called the “Marilyn Monroe” towers because of their curving exteriors. The two skyscrapers have become the Eiffel Tower of Mississauga’s skyline.

They are joined by more than five dozen other highrises built in the city’s centre, where new residents are redefining Mississauga’s old identity as a sprawling bedroom community west of Toronto.
“Currently, our city centre is experiencing a type of development-renaissance,” says downtown Councillor Frank Dale. “The Absolute/Marilyn project was a key component of our growth, and has acted as a catalyst for further development in the City Centre district.”

After decades of growth, Mississauga is almost built out. Now, with new provincial guidelines in place for intensification within its city centre as part of Ontario’s “Places to Grow” strategy and the city’s own ambitious “Downtown 21” plan, the country’s sixth largest city is finally “growing up.”
“The fact that Mississauga now has a skyline and the Marilyn towers — that’s how I define a city,” says Nicole Nath, who moved into a highrise condo in downtown Mississauga two years ago with her young family.

She lived in the city off and on while growing up and remembers when the city’s centre was little more than Square One Mall and hay fields. Today, Nath says, “using the word ‘downtown’ in Mississauga is weird.”
The change has been dramatic. According to city staff, the population of the nascent “city centre” in 1981 was just 259. In 2011 it was 24,000.

Mississauga’s new commitment to intensification, the province says, is what the entire region around Toronto should be doing to avoid future sprawl and congestion.

The development of a truly urban core is no accident.

“Where (Harold) Shipp’s four buildings are now, cows and horses were grazing there in 1978,” says Mayor Hazel McCallion. “To think this used to be a hayfield not long ago, we’ve done pretty well.”
McCallion says the vision for a real downtown began in the mid-’70s, when residential and commercial development was concentrated in core areas of the various townships incorporated in 1974 as the City of Mississauga.