Cloud Gardens
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Cloud Gardens is a small park in downtown Toronto. It is located on Richmond Street just east of Bay Street on a half acre (2,000 m²) of land. The site was given to the city of Toronto in the 1980s as part of a deal to allow the Bay Adelaide Centre to be higher than allowed by the official plan. The developers thus gave a small portion of the lot to the city and spent $5 million to build a park.
The park is one of the more elaborate in Toronto and it won George Baird a Governor General's Architecture Award. The western edge of it is marked by a cluster of trees with a crescent of lawn in the middle. The eastern portion is more elaborate with a series of walkways climbing past a waterfall. Rising above this portion is a monument to Toronto's construction workers designed by Margaret Priest and constructed by the Building Trades Union. It consists of a series of squares each illustrating the art of one of the building trades. Thus one shows a network of steel rebars, while another a cluster of wiring.
The namesake feature of the Gardens is a small greenhouse set to the cool and moist conditions of certain mountain ecologies. A walkway runs from the lower level entrance to an upper level exit by the waterfall.
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