Toronto’s Water Treatment Park

Think you know what a water treatment plant looks like? Sherbourne Common, a nearly completed treatment plant on Toronto’s waterfront, is housed beneath a public park featuring dramatic concrete and light sculptures, an ice-skating rink, water channels and nearly 200 new trees. A blog post from the Dirt puts it best:

“In a marvel of thoughtful design and engineering, the new 3.6-acre, $30 million park commissioned by Waterfront Toronto and designed by a team led by landscape architecture firm Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg uses ultraviolet light to clean polluted water coming in from Lake Ontario. Given not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) obstacles in cities are only expected to persist in the near term, these types of hybrid park-infrastructure projects make great sense, particularly given few communities can afford to build expensive, single-use ‘dumb’ infrastructure. Many communities may jump at the chance for a beautiful park that does so much more. IMBY please?”

Check out an extensive image gallery of renderings and actual photos of Sherbourne Common; a picture of one of the sites’ water channels and bioinfiltration beds after the jump.