Leah Houston, executive director of the Toronto non-profit Mabelle Arts, has never cared for the maxim “If you build it, they will come.” The saying, she says, leaves a lot of questions unanswered. For instance, who’s “they”? If you don’t know the people you’re building for, how can you be sure you’re meeting their needs?
In 2018, Mabelle Arts began collaborating with LGA Architectural Partners, a Toronto firm, to design the Belle, 120-square-metre sculptural pavilion at the centre of the Mabelle community — a West Toronto neighbourhood comprising a cluster of towers inhabited mostly by newcomers and low-income residents. Builders broke ground on the Belle in 2023, and the centre had its official opening last fall. But really, Houston argues, the project got underway as far back as 2004.
That’s when she first started spending time at Mabelle, doing the social groundwork necessary to make the building an eventual success. Back then, she was an intern at Jumblies Theatre, a non-profit that specializes in grassroots productions. Over three years, Jumblies collaborated with more than 100 Mabelle residents, many of them Somali refugees, to create Bridge of One Hair, an opera about the life of Hawa Jibril, a celebrated Somali poet who spent her final decades in exile in one of the Mabelle towers. After the show premiered at a downtown theatre in 2007, Jumblies moved on to other projects, but Houston stuck around. She founded Mabelle Arts that year, and began working with local residents on participatory projects.
She defined her mandate as expansively as possible, moving beyond what most people would consider the normal remit of an arts organization. “Broken benches in the community? We fixed them,” says Houston. “Garbage in the park? We cleaned it up. Once you’ve got small, quick wins under your belt, you begin to build trust.” Soon, she was bringing people in on more ambitious projects — outdoor Ramadan dinners, collaborative sculptural installations, and a series of winter parades that saw the night illuminated by a massive biomorphic lantern. “We’ve always had a bias toward big, chaotic, rowdy events,” says Houston.
In the late 2010s, the City of Toronto provided funding to improve Mabelle Park. Houston and her team then asked community leaders what they thought about erecting a permanent building. She didn’t want to impose her vision on the neighbourhood, but she had a few guiding ideas about what the structure should be. It should be located, she figured, in Mabelle Park — a once-neglected green space that had become a local hub — and it should be maximally flexible. “I’ve visited cultural spaces,” Houston says, “where there’s a pottery room that nobody uses or a music studio that’s full of outdated equipment.” Such over-programming, she believes, is usually a bad idea. Community members must be free to decide how their spaces will be used — and also to change their minds.
LGA was the perfect partner on the project, because the firm’s staff was eager to do the slow, painstaking work of building trust. LGA consulted tirelessly with local residents and, to help people envision the site, staked out the building footprint with coloured painter’s tape and bamboo sticks. When COVID hit, LGA worked with Mabelle Arts to transform the park into a temporary food bank; a 1974 Sprite Caravan was converted into a pantry.
Like Houston, Janna Levitt, a partner at LGA and the lead architect on the project, thought carefully about why public buildings sometimes fail and how such failures can be averted. To avoid turning the Belle into a fortress, she steered clear of hostile security architecture like bars, bollards and visible cameras, and she made the overall aesthetic as friendly as possible. The Belle is a rectangular structure that funnels upward into two Seussian tapered skylights. It’s clad in semi-reflective aluminum tiles set at a 45-degree angle. The vibe is whimsical, although the material is graffiti-resistant (thanks to a special coating), and hardy enough to repel almost any projectile that gets lobbed its way (the substructure is fortified with increased blocking and strapping). “One resident said that the building reminds him of a spaceship,” says Levitt.
The interiors are more grounded, consisting, as they do, of two rooms — a back-end office for Mabelle Arts staff and a front-end community space — which are connected by a divider that’s almost always open. The desks and workstations can be whisked into a corner anytime people need expanded arts space. At the front of the building, there’s a set of folding doors that opens first onto a deck that can double as a proscenium stage, and then onto the park itself, which has plenty of room for seating.
Everything has multiple uses. The Belle is both thrifty (“We went for the absolute minimum floor plate,” says Levitt) and incredibly low-maintenance. The polished concrete floors can take a beating, and, because the windows mostly adhere to standard industry sizes, they can be easily replaced with off-the-shelf substitutes. These choices weren’t just convenient, Levitt explains, but critical. “In the public sector, it’s one thing to get brick-and-mortar funds,” she says, “but it’s almost impossible to get regular maintenance dollars.”
For her, public architecture succeeds when it’s understood as both communitarian — that is, generous enough to meet people’s needs in the present and adaptable enough to meet them in the future — and, by necessity, political, since every public building is, for better or worse, an ambassador for every other public building (and, really, for the entire public-design enterprise). “These projects get greater scrutiny than any other type of architecture,” says Levitt. “There are always people who will look at a failed building and say, ‘Why did the City pay for this?’ ”
On the flip side, there are also people who will look at a successful building and say, “This is why public design matters.” Currently, Mabelle Arts is testing out the new space with small, simple events — movie nights, community meals, open-studio crafting sessions. But Houston hopes to soon move on to bigger endeavours: an installation for Nuit Blanche and, maybe, next summer, an arts festival. “We’re learning about the different things our spaceship can do,” she says, “and the many places it can fly to.”
A Tiny but Mighty Pavilion for Mabelle Arts in Toronto
The Belle, a Seussian pavilion for the West End Toronto cultural hub, was designed by LGA Architectural Partners for and with its diverse community.