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Bungle: Do or make clumsily or unskillfully; spoil by clumsiness or lack of skill. There are two ways to understand the meaning of bungling. Look in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, or consider Toronto's call for the redevelopment of Union Station -- the city's real-estate jewel -- in which the art of bungling is taken to new heights.

To fully appreciate the manhandling of the redevelopment process, remember that Union Station is a major gateway to Toronto, and that it serves as the crucial linchpin between the downtown, the waterfront and the rest of the city. It also connects the city to the suburbs: Over 100,000 commuters travel through Union Station every day -- that's twice the number travelling through Chicago's main terminal and slightly more than those using Washington's Union Station.

When the City of Toronto purchased Union Station in August, 2000, it declared that it wanted to revitalize the station, celebrate its heritage value, and promote the terminal as a pivotal transportation hub. The architectural significance of Union Station is indisputable. It was designed by Montreal architects G. A. Ross and R. H. MacDonald as one of the great beaux-arts momuments to modernism (1913 -- 1927) and, like New York's Grand Central Station, is recognized as the country's most significant living room.

Behind every artful practice, from winemaking to bureaucratic bungling, there are some fundamental principles requiring strict attention. Here are some of the strategies that have guaranteed the sublime folly of the Union Station redevelopment process.

1. Treat your city's most visible piece of real estate as something invisible. Instead of organizing an open design competition with exhibitions and public consultations -- as did the Royal Ontario Museum -- devise a highly secretive process in which all proceedings are held in camera at city council. Write confidentiality all over the request for proposal (RFP) sent out to development teams, and insist on complete secrecy for all competitors -- even after the winning team has been appointed.

In particular, keep the names of the competing architects secret throughout the process, even though the likes of Dutch superstar Rem Koolhaas and America's Flash Gordon of architecture, Helmuth Jahn, could garner local, national and even international accolades.

Not everybody on city council thinks this is what grown-up cities should be encouraging. Councillor David Miller says, "The process has been totally botched . . . This is the No. 1 piece of real estate in the country. In the end, there should have been presentations about the visions that these competing teams had."

2. Pretend that this procedure is routine. Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman assures us that maintaining the secrecy of the design and financial packages is standard. Why? He's not sure -- except that his staff told him so. "This is the way that the city's RFPs have always been done," says Patricia Simpson, the city's legal counsel and main co-ordinator of the redevelopment event.

This is untrue. Look at the competitions organized for the city's parks, such as Yorkville Village Park, and the openness surrounding the National Trade Centre at the CNE. And consider New City Hall, the granddaddy of enlightened monument-making. An international, open competition was organized after the public was invited -- twice -- to vote on a civic ballot whether the project should go ahead.

3. Impose absurd conditions on all those involved in pitching and receiving the bids. For instance, prevent the final two competing teams from making a direct pitch to city councillors. Instead, ask city staff to make both pitches for them -- minus the passion, the vision details and the ability to answer tough questions. Running scared since then, the main spokespeople at the city and both of the competing teams are refusing to confirm or deny which consultants make up their team, or what the team's vision might be. This makes for highly entertaining cloak-and-dagger, especially as this critic has found out who's who.

4. Keep all information locked up with absurd gag restrictions. Right up to press time, mum's the word -- even the city's urban-design director has been left out in the cold. But with so many staff working on the report, and consultants living here and there, people forget what they should or shouldn't say.

Here's the list, because the public deserves to know:

The winning team is Union Pearson Group Inc., a local consortium headed by O & Y Properties, and including OMERS Realty Corporation, Jones Lang LaSalle (the retail managers for the revitalization at Grand Central Station), Zeidler Grinnell Partnership (Toronto architects best known for Ontario Place and many innovative hospitals, but not for finely detailed heritage restoration), and Murphy/Jahn Architects, a Chicago-based powerhouse whose high-tech postmodern skyscrapers brought it to fame in the 1980s.

Word is that this team, although weak on heritage sensitivity and fine integration of new architecture with old, won the bid because of its financial package. Their scheme is photo-shopped with crowds of groovy-looking people, but there's a disturbing loss of place -- an uncomfortable aura of hygiene that says, "I'm sorry, this is not a gateway to Canada's largest city; it's a place to check your blood pressure." As for the Great Hall, it's been cluttered up with benches around an entertainer. The circulation around the train platform looks disturbingly generic.

The loser is LP Heritage + Union Station Consortium. Patrick O'Leary, a retail developer with Landau & Heyman, Chicago, leads the group. He spent eight years as a key player in the planning and execution of Washington's Union Station redevelopment. Beyer Blinder Belle, acclaimed heritage architects from New York, are on the team, along with superstar visionary Rem Koolhaas. Struck by the way the beaux-arts structure sits at the heart of work, movement and play (the waterfront, the SkyDome and the central business district), Koolhaas articulated a clever idea called "Re-union" for the station. One urban device he proposed was a massive civic square that connects the myriad zones of the downtown.

If Toronto were as capable of the kind of gutsy moves made by cities like Barcelona or Seattle, this scheme would have won hands down. But the group's financial backers are reported to be slightly less impressive. Oh dear. As one insider sighed, "The city naively tried to do this as a business venture."

5. Ignore the massive train-station redevelopments by our neighbours south of the 49th. There have been important precedents set by the redevelopment of Union Station in both Washington and Chicago. There have been invaluable lessons to be gained by the masterful restoration and revitalization of New York's Grand Central Station, used by 500,000 people daily. In the case of Grand Central, the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority hired Beyer Blinder Belle to do a "condition-assessment report" of the station's entire inventory. Says Marjorie Anders, a spokesperson for New York's Metro North transportation agency, "We asked them: What do we have, what do we need, and how do we get there?"

Once the city knew the exact state of their station, an open call was put out, and the public was invited to get involved. Eventually, the commission for the heritage restoration and retail revitalization of the beaux-arts structure was awarded to Beyer Blinder Belle. The station has been painstakingly restored to its original palette of elegant materials, from the floor to the 12-storey-high ceiling with its stars and gilded constellations of the zodiac. Many of the design moves that Beyer Blinder Belle made at Grand Central also informed their scheme for Toronto: clear sightlines through the Great Hall, and clarity of circulation throughout the station.

"Our feeling about the building and the primary spaces within Toronto's Union Station is that it is to Canada what Grand Central is to the United States," says Douglas McKean, a partner at Beyer Blinder Belle.

Union Station's Great Hall "is something we view as a sacred space for Canada -- that's not something where we took a lot of liberties. If we were putting in a new stair, like we did at Grand Central, we put it in stone to be a near-replica of the existing."

This October, Toronto city staff will present a status report on the redevelopment of Union Station. My status report can't wait that long -- to date, the process has been stunningly naive. Hasn't Enron taught us something? Open the design schemes to the public, and reveal the details of the financial package. Then get on with honouring Union Station with a magnificent redevelopment. lrochon@globeandmail.ca

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