Don Mills Community Recreation Centre

With a design informed by extensive public consultation, the 171,000sf Don Mills Community Recreation Centre removes barriers to participation, bringing a full complement of amenities and social opportunities to serve all residents of its north Toronto neighbourhood. The tight urban site necessitated the stacking of program spaces over two levels, but this compact planning also presented the opportunity to connect the facility’s primary spaces to one another and to the outside.

The project’s landscape architecture draws from the cultural and natural heritage of the nearby Don River Valley. The Valley’s places of motion and immersion—where people walk, cycle, gather, and reconnect with the land in the heart of the city—inform the expression of the new recreation centre’s outdoor spaces. The design interprets the valley’s linear rhythms, textures, and lush natural variety to create a contemporary civic terrain, one balancing robust urban performance with sensory delight and the sustaining of local biodiversity.