East Point Bird Sanctuary

This Toronto project is part of a citywide initiative to enhance and protect bird habitat and increase birding activity through public education programming. East Point Park is the first of six key sites to be developed and improved over the next several years.

The pavilions at East Point Park Bird Sanctuary use architecture as a means of framing one of Toronto’s most beautiful parks, while enhancing the pleasures of birding. Folded into angular shapes evocative of flight, sheets of weathering steel form the pavilions for this wooded park on the Scarborough Bluffs, high above Lake Ontario. The pavilions are the central gathering place, provide shelter from the elements, and are vantage points for spectacular views of the lake, an inland pond and the birds that inhabit it. Waterjet-cut through the pavilion’s walls are clouds of birds in flight above the names of species that frequent this significant migratory flyway stopover site. The structures’ weathering steel walls and roofs form distinctive profiles against the sky, just as the silhouette of a bird in flight is often enough information for an experienced birder to identify the species. Each of the pavilions has a tiny footprint, but the strategic positioning of these structures within a walking circuit promotes the exploration of a large park which includes the Viewing Pavilion, a Bird Blind, Entry Signage and a future Sound Pavilion.