Spring: A Project for Concord

SPRING: a secular cathedral
A project for Concord Park Place, Toronto

The project for Concord features imagery taken entirely from Tree Blossoms —from that brief period when the city’s tree’s bloom and announce the start of the stage of renewal.

The project’s initial parameters included selected glazing on the tower, the exterior of the roof top mechanical room and a pedestrian walkway, which required the installation of windscreens. The glazing installations starts at ground level and continues through to the 36th floor — on the North and South sides of the building. in a glass spine visible from both inside and outside the tower. The Rooftop project features a pixilated blossom visible from many miles away — from the 401 Highway and from the air. The pedestrian windscreens are 3 separate obelisks, which break the wind and at central set of stairs into the retail level of the tower.

Since the images for the glazing would be produced onto a transparent film subsequently affixed between the double paned glass I began to consider the strengths and challenges of how a Cathedral’s stained glass might work and to consider how traditional stained glass behaves so differently between day and night and inside and outside. This project has many of those elements though the imagery is entirely secular.

A secondary project was developed for the interior public area’s where these same thematic concerns have been extended. There is a chromatic shift in these interior installations; while the exterior images were high chroma the interior images are situated just next to black and white, with only a memory of colour.

James Lahey
Spring 2013 – Autumn 2014