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A mock-up of a spirit garden is shown on screen at a National Truth and Reconciliation Day event at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto on Sept. 30, 2022.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
The turtle rises from the water, poised to move toward the chamber of Toronto City Hall. This six-foot-tall limestone gesture of re-emergence is the centrepiece of the new Spirit Garden at Nathan Phillips Square, which brings an Indigenous presence to the city’s ceremonial heart.
At the garden’s centre sits the Teaching Lodge, a hybrid of longhouse and circular wigwam fashioned from glue-laminated ash. The structure invites local Indigenous communities to gather for ceremony and reflection. “It represents a cross-cultural approach to Indigenous design,” says Brian Porter of Two Row Architect. “How can one structure represent the traditions of peoples from across the continent?”
That is the ambition of this project, first imagined in 2019 as a memorial to victims of residential schools. The final result asserts an Indigenous presence at the geographic and symbolic centre of the city.
After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report in 2015, the Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre and city officials began working on a memorial. This evolved into the nearly 30,000-square-foot garden, designed by a team including Gow Hastings Architects and the Indigenous-led studio Two Row.
Gow Hastings Architects helped shape the project’s architecture and public realm (including the complex technical challenge of repairing the surface of the square, which tops a massive parking garage).
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People visit in the Teaching Lodge in Nathan Phillips Square during Truth and Reconciliation Day ceremonies on Sept. 30, 2024.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Anishinaabe-Red River Métis artist Tannis Nielsen sculpted a Métis canoe of stainless steel, marked with intricately cut and etched decorations. An Inukshuk built by Henry Angootinmarik Kudluk includes rock marked with orange lichen – a nod to the orange shirts commemorating National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Then there is the turtle, a memorial object carved from limestone by Anishinaabe artist Solomon King. It rises from a reflecting pond, alongside a wall etched with the names of the 18 residential schools in Ontario. All this is oriented to cardinal north, and therefore at a 12-degree angle to the grid of Toronto’s streets and of the square. This subtle misalignment reinforces the garden’s distinct identity and connection to Indigenous cosmology.
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The landscape and buildings reveal some common threads across Indigenous cultures, including what Mr. Porter describes as a “craftful approach” to materials. “People have always taken materials and used them in the most efficient way, achieving the best ratio of strength to material,” he explains. “Whether it’s a longhouse, snowshoe, canoe or wigwam, the design balances resourcefulness with function.”
This philosophy guided Mr. Porter and his colleagues to select materials and details that might usually be dismissed by municipal project managers as too unconventional or expensive. The exterior cladding and landscape signage use Muntz metal – a copper-zinc alloy that shimmers like bronze.
The lodge’s front door is solid oak, evoking the solid wood door handles at the nearby City Hall by the Finnish architect Viljo Revell. The material choice is not just symbolism – it’s texture and mass, the kind of door that tells you someone cared enough to build for the next seven generations.
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Mr. Porter credits city project manager Ikwal Brianna and Council Fire’s Theo Nazary for keeping the vision intact.
But the square also has a fraught history, which the garden helps to heal. Once this was St. John’s Ward, Toronto’s most diverse and densely populated neighbourhood. Many of its residents and buildings were cleared in the 1950s to make way for civic buildings. But Mr. Revell’s design for a civic living room was never fully implemented.
For years, this corner of Nathan Phillips Square was a patch of bare gravel, a symbol of stalled ambition and forgotten promises. The Spirit Garden alters that narrative.
It demonstrates that when Indigenous voices lead, and when design is backed by the kind of serious effort and funding that public projects so rarely receive, public spaces can become powerful places of memory, meaning and belonging.