Architect: Alan Crossley
Consulting Engineer: Laurence Cazaly

A unique modernist structure; a fantastical space-age park shelter nestled in a meadow along the Humber River Recreational Trail. The Oculus's sculptural quality and use of concrete is part of a generation of ambitious and optimistic public pavilions built in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Summer 2019, The Oculus Revitalization project is one of five selected for Park People's Public Space Incubator Grant, funded by the Balsam Foundation and Ken and Eti Greenberg.

Inspired by the oculus (“eye”) in the dome of the Pantheon in Rome or the product of a vision that was entirely his own, Alan Crossley’s mid-century modern Toronto Oculus soars like a flying saucer in an urban forest beneath its glorious views of the heavens. In 2016 the Oculus was threatened with “revitalization” that would demolish its washroom and wrap the slender steel posts that support it in the washroom’s rusticated stone. Stephanie Mah, Secretary of ACO NextGen, organized a Facebook petition that requested a more sensitive preservation.  Result: thanks to its Park People Public Space Incubator grant architects Joey Giaimo and Kim Storey will oversee restoration of the Oculus with new landscaping and benches around it; making it ready for future weddings and much more.

While restoration of the oculus is delayed by the pandemic of COVID-19, it stands, cleaned of graffiti, transformed, by Joey Giaimo and Creative Silhouette’s Inc., into a sunburst, waiting for its new future. A symbol of “Brighter Days Ahead.”

For more see: South Humber Park Pavillion Heritage Report July 2019 by Kim Storey, Brown+Storey Architects