Toronto Street Furniture
ASTRAL MEDIA & CITY OF TORONTO, TORONTO
Recipient of a prestigious Urban Design Award, KDA’s Toronto street furniture program provides residents and visitors with elegant, contemporary and timeless amenities that seamlessly integrate with the city’s streetscapes, significantly enhancing the user experience. It marks Toronto’s first-ever coordinated street furniture program and stands as one of the largest programs of its kind in North America.
KDA’s comprehensive program encompassed product research, innovative development, stakeholder and public consultation, creative and industrial design, integration of sustainable initiatives, as well as the overarching management of the construction and installation of more than 25,620 pieces of individual furniture, including transit shelters, benches, litter receptacles, bike racks, and public posting and wayfinding columns.
KDA skillfully fashioned the Toronto street furniture to harmonize seamlessly with broad ranging architectural and urban contexts. The incorporation of district and BIA branding, thematic elements and accent colours within the furniture’s design language serves to reflect the diverse character and culture of Toronto neighbourhoods.
Understanding Toronto’s unique streetscape conditions allowed KDA to build a visual vocabulary for the street furniture program, one that uniquely speaks to the city’s character, while delivering the highest level of public services.
KDA’s street furniture solutions were custom developed to be an appropriate reflection of Toronto, evoking and raising civic pride, serving its residents and visitors, and reinforcing the city’s global brand identity and international appeal.
Sense of
Lightness
Transit Shelter
By incorporating transparency and a sense of lightness, the cantilevered shelter design ensures that it remains unobtrusive in shape, visual impact, and footprint. Its subtle form serves as a means to integrate with surrounding environments, further enhancing the overall vision of city places.
Strategic Kit-of-parts
To create furniture that could effectively operate within Toronto’s context, KDA employed a strategic methodology to formulate flexible design solutions. These solutions embraced a modular ‘kit-of-parts’ concept tailored to varying site and street conditions, circulation patterns, weather challenges, and most importantly, human considerations.
Fluid Form, Timeless Design
Fluid in form and timeless in design, each bench is a beautiful composition of a curved, custom-cast stainless steel framework that serves as a seamless foundation for the ipe wood plank seating.
KDA has been very cooperative and accommodating in working with City of Toronto officials in the development, design and management of the extensive and comprehensive street furniture program.
No-Touch Litter Receptacles
The litter receptacles with ‘hands-free’ functionality feature a foot-pedal mechanism that, when easily pressed, opens the receptacle flaps. This eliminates the need for direct contact between the users hands and the receptacle or the waste. The flaps can also be opened without utilizing the foot-pedal, to accommodate conventional use or wheelchair accessibility.
Revenue-Generating Displays
KDA’s transit shelters and information pillars incorporate digital advertising screens, forming a revenue-generating media network. This network serves to cover not only the costs of constructing and upkeeping the street furniture but also generates supplementary income for the City of Toronto, which can be directed towards streetscape beautification.
The information pillars, named INFOTOGO® by KDA, showcase cartographic maps of Toronto. These maps serve the dual purpose of highlighting points of interest, notable attractions, and important local destinations, all while encouraging pedestrian-friendly walkability.
Complementary Amenities
Bike racks, tree grates, public restrooms, and pedestrian safety guards, are among the various complementary amenities that contribute to the entirety of the street furniture program.
TOstreetsmart®
KDA titled the street furniture program TOstreetsmart® – as it was essential the design process responded intelligently to Toronto’s varied streetscapes, neighbourhoods and architectural expressions that compose the city’s urban environment. TOstreetsmart® does not attempt to make its true impact by individual pieces or single locations; rather, it achieves visual continuity and strength through the impact of multiple citywide locations.