The New Beautiful

The Annex
by johnfitzgerald
The Annex is an affluent neighbourhood with well-educated residents and it borders the University of Toronto. It has traditionally been home to many of the university's faculty, as well as housing the university's student body.

Cabbagetown
by Mary
Local legend has it that Cabbagetown is so named because poor Irish and Macedonian immigrant inhabitants from the late nineteenth century could only afford to eat the cabbage they grew themselves, supposedly in their front yards.

Spruce Court - Cabbagetown
by Miss Dys
Spruce Court - originally built as public housing (the first in the city) in the 1910's, has since been turned into a housing co-op.

Urban Tilt - The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)
by Mr. Mark

Jumping Girl - The ROM
by Sam Javanrouh

Stair of Wonders - ROM
by livinginacity

The ROM at Night
by livinginacity

The ROM reflected in the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM)
by Gavatron

Inside the RCM Addition
by Phil Jackman

Old City Hall
by schneller2000

Old City Hall
by Keith Watson [pics: flickr.com]

Toronto Architecture by Lu
Toronto by Scott Norsworthy
Architecture & Structures by livinginacity

Cyberpunk Built by the Swiss
by Shawn Micallef
eyeweekly.com - 02/18/09

Long before I moved to Toronto, a native Torontonian described this city as the ultimate cyberpunk metropolis. This was the mid-1990s, when we could say cyber-anything without snickering, and he was referring specifically to the genre of science fiction that blended high tech with the old. Its perfect cinematic expression is the futuristic Los Angeles depicted in the film Blade Runner where “the future” wasn’t completely modern, like the one seen on Star Trek, but a more realistic one where the new stuff was built on top of and around existing old stuff. Apart from perhaps the androids, rampant crime and unicorns, it’s the messy vision of the future that we see unfolding today in Toronto and it may be useful in describing what the elusive, near impossible to explain “Toronto look” is.

Sci-fi purists would argue that Toronto is not nearly the kind of dystopia required to be truly cyberpunk, and they’re right, but that blend of new and old is what Toronto does very well and often effortlessly. Here we have glass, steel and concrete skyscrapers next to old buildings — even Victorian and Edwardian single-family homes — and, quite often, it works out just fine. Even those beloved old downtown neighbourhoods are heavily modified. While the facades of homes in the Annex, Beaconsfield Village and Cabbagetown may look like movie sets, the interiors are usually renovated and the backsides often include modern additions. An early childhood visual memory I have of Toronto is of vaguely Victorian-looking houses with skylights carved in the roofs. It was striking, but seemed right: old things alive and lived in.

Toronto is not a period piece, like some pristine European cities are, and we are fortunate for that. Toronto is always changing (an urban workshop more than a museum) and always has been. New things are being added all the time, making this an exciting place to live, unlike, say, the morgue of a city that Paris has become. When was the last time you heard about an interesting building or contemporary art scene that’s come out of Paris? Our lack of cohesive architectural look — what snobs might refer to as “ugly” — means this city is tabula rasa, a blank slate waiting for us to do stuff in it without too much historical burden to smother the new, allowing cultural ferment of all kinds to happen.

While the Royal Ontario Museum crystal may have various faults that can and will be argued about, the oft-heard opinion that it ruins the classical design of the original building is deserving of a challenge. If any building in this city audaciously embodies what Toronto truly is, it’s the ROM. The same new-old combination has worked next door at the Royal Conservatory of Music and across town at the National Ballet School on Jarvis and at many other locations.

Yet when new and old come together in less high-profile locations, it’s not an easy concept for Torontonians to reconcile. The internalized image of this city — at least for a large chunk of the politically active downtownish crowd — is of a low-rise, pre–World War One city. That causes problems, because much of Toronto is distinctly not that. Our notorious fear of skyscraper height seems like an invented untruth as the view from a plane’s window flying in reveals a forest of high-rises spreading to all civic borders, the most in North America after New York City.

While resistance to appropriately located high-rises is one problem, a more critical effect of the internalized image of Toronto the Old is that our modern heritage is at risk right now. Postwar buildings are at an age where they’re just out of fashion, and fashion is cruel and fickle. In Toronto’s 1950s and ’60s expansion, modern architecture was the embodiment of this new, hopeful and forward-thinking era: Diefenbaker-style progress and the architectural expression of this country finally living up to Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s 1904 sentiment that the “20th century belongs to Canada.”

The great irony is that many of these at-risk buildings replaced older Victorian and Edwardian buildings — the very same kind we hold precious today — that were easily demolished with little public outcry precisely because they were out of fashion. People didn’t like the frilly gingerbread trim, various pineapple and gargoyle doo-dads and small windows, so they were easily disposed of. We almost lost Old City Hall because it was out of fashion, like a giant pair of acid-wash jeans standing at Queen and Bay.

An interesting case today is found at the Guild Inn out on the Scarborough Bluffs. The city-owned property includes a magnificent rambling house built in 1914 (with later additions) and a mid-rise 1960s modernist tower building with repeating scallop-shell balconies. The current plan is to refurbish the older building as a home for Centennial College’s new Cultural Heritage Institute, but demolish the tower. The local city councillor has even called the tower an “eyesore the surrounding community wants to see come down.” Yet when reasons for saving one and trashing the other are interrogated, they’re interchangeable and could apply to either. It comes down to personal taste. When that happens, modern heritage loses, just like old Toronto lost in the decades after WWII when the same justifications for demolition were used then as now.

Preserving modern architecture does not mean rejecting the older stuff. Instead we need a shift in how we view ourselves. In Toronto, various community groups — the envy of so many other less engaged cities — have made large historic tracts of this city relatively safe from redevelopment, but they need to expand their idea of what Toronto is now and embrace both modern heritage and locations where the new and bold can fit in appropriately with the old and noble.

That look, while a bit messy, is the new beautiful. Toronto’s motto “Diversity Our Strength” should apply to more than just its people.

***************************************
NEW POST
Libraries