As tall cookie-cutter towers burst from the landscape all across Toronto, one new development is bucking the trend with a mountain range-shaped building with peaks covered in cascading greenery.
Four years into construction, the sprawling mountainscape known as KING Toronto’s four connected peaks have topped out as high as 16 storeys above 489 King St. W., between Spadina and Portland, and the new iconic landmark for the area just crossed another significant milestone on its way to completion.
Developers Westbank Corp and Allied Properties REIT are making a tremendous splash on the local architecture scene, bringing on acclaimed Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) for the firm’s first development in the city.
Fareen Karim
Work on the project commenced in mid-2020, and after four and a half years of construction, the complex’s distinctive design has become quite apparent.
Buildings reached structural completion this past summer, and work has since begun for the next big step in bringing this vision to reality.
Fareen Karim
The most recent development at KING Toronto has been the start of installation for the building’s exterior finishes this fall.
Unlike your traditional local condo design, KING Toronto is being clad in panels of glass blocks, a design aesthetic that has been used by high-profile architects to finish landmark buildings around the world, perhaps most notably by Renzo Piano for his Maison Hermès building in Tokyo.
KING Toronto received the first of its glass block panels in September after several months of delays, launching the project into its long-awaited exterior finishing stage.
Fareen Karim
Over two months into the exterior finish installation process, work appears to be crawling along at a snail’s pace.
However, the panels installed as of mid-December 2024 offer a tantalizing preview of what’s to come over the next several months.
Fareen Karim
Glass block panels now cover a large section of the complex’s ground floor. It may be hard to visualize at this early stage, but these panels — which will cover the entire structure with varying translucent and opaque sections — will form an exterior unlike anything else in the city once complete.
Fareen Karim
While the panels may lack colour on their own, renderings of the project promise an exterior draped in greenery, giving these mountainous peaks the illusion of forested slopes.
The project fronts onto King Street West, incorporating preserved heritage facades to help the monumental new structure blend with the street-level context along the major thoroughfare.
The complex’s main face will be on King Street, but a large multi-storey opening carved through the base of the artificial massif will allow pedestrians to filter through the block to Wellington Street to the south.
Fareen Karim
An area south of the build site, currently occupied by a small green space, will be transformed into a new cat-themed park by the same designers as Toronto’s iconic dog fountain.
The project is anticipated to wrap construction in 2025, bringing 440 new condominium units to the neighbourhood.
