Category: Architecture

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Architecture

Mid-Life Crisis

Black and white photo of an apartment building from the 1950s that incorporates mod cinder blocks.
Apartment building on Douglas Street across from Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, B.C.

We celebrated the end of the pandemic with a trip to visit family in Victoria, B.C. That was last November just days before the omicron variant arrived and forced us to rethink the idea of an “end” to the pandemic. For a brief few days, we got to pretend life had returned to normal. Our worries were restricted to minor issues like flooding, washed out infrastructure, and food and gas shortages. Ah, those were simpler times!

On my second morning there, the rain let up so I walked down to Ogden Point where I caught the sunrise. To get back to the hotel, I went up Douglas Street with apartment buildings to my left and Beacon Hill Park to my right. About half way along the park, I paused to admire an apartment building probably built in the 1950s. In particular, I found myself mesmerized by a simple retro design feature: square white-washed concrete blocks with a star motif in the centre, stacked to form a low wall in front of the building and repeated on each of the balconies. Apart from UFOs and drive-thru burger palaces served by bobby-soxers on roller skates, I can’t imagine anything more emblematic of the 1950s.

I paused to take a shot, then continued along the sidewalk where a sign came into view: Beacon Tower, a 55+ building. I stumbled a little. You see, it isn’t so long ago that I passed that 55+ threshold. I turned back to the building and stared at the retro blocks. Christ, I thought, I qualify to live in an “adult lifestyle” building.

The fact is: I graduated from high school only two or three years ago. Mentally at least (my wife insists I’m far more immature than that and have only graduated from junior high). Because I’m still in reasonably good shape, don’t suffer inordinate aches and pains, and don’t experience shortness of breath when I exert myself, I’ve never come up against anything that challenges my admittedly distorted view of myself. My rational brain tells me I need to grow up which means I need to worry about cholesterol and book an appointment for a colonoscopy. But my rational faculties have always been the smallest part of my brain.

I wonder if the posted 55+ threshold isn’t an artifact from the days when the apartment building first opened its doors. Our perception of what counts as old has changed. In 1888, Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backwards, 2000 to 1887 imagined life in the year 2000 where workers retire at the age of 45 so they have at least a few good years left to enjoy life. No doubt, Bellamy’s threshold was influenced by the deplorable working conditions in Victorian England and their impact on average life expectancy. In the 1950s, we could push that figure along by 10 years. Now, I can’t imagine putting up my feet at 55 and drifting from there into my sunset years. In fact, I can’t imagine putting up my feet at any age.

The gradual deferral of what counts as old age also finds a correlation in changing expectations about when one should start a family. That decision determines how old an infant’s grandparents are. When I was born, my grandmother was 41. When my son was born, his grandmother was 50. As for me, I’ve surpassed them with no prospect of becoming a grandparent. That’s just as well, as I’m only a couple years out of high school and hardly fit for the task.

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Architecture

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – S1.E3 Ghosts of Illyria

Black and white photograph of Ontario Place buildings rising from the ice covered waters of a thawing Lake Ontario.
Ontario Place

Strange New Worlds, the latest installment in the Star Trek franchise, explores pre-Kirk life in the Federation. In particular, we learn the back story of Captain Christopher Pike whom we first met in “The Menagerie” which aired in 1966. Anson Mount plays the current iteration of Pike, a character written according to a longstanding template that makes him indistinguishable from James T Kirk. When he’s not in the chair on the bridge, he’s riding a horse in Montana while sporting a rugged beard. Starfleet rules are really suggestions, but he only breaches them when higher values are at stake. And he carries himself with a good-humoured sex appeal that, sooner or later, will have some large-breasted alien swooning.

Why, you may ask, does a guy with a photo blog post a piece about Star Trek? Glad you asked. It turns out they’re filming Strange New Worlds in that strangest of strange new worlds, the city of Toronto. This became cringingly obvious in the first shots of episode 3, “Ghosts of Illyria.” The opening shots establish that the Enterprise is in orbit around an alien world, home to species called the Illyrians. The next shot takes us to the planet’s surface where an away team has landed only to find that the planet’s inhabitants are missing. We swoop across the surface of a large body of water and the camera rises to the horizon. A strange alien structure comes into view.

It’s Ontario Place. But in the future. And on another planet.

For more than 10 years now, Ontario Place has been a sad shell of its former self, serving no particular purpose other than to slowly rust away into the lapping waters of Lake Ontario. Doug Ford’s decision to make it a terminus for his new subway line strikes me as utterly pointless. Once built, the Ford line will be the subway ride to useless. But don’t worry. He’ll license a casino there to one of his mob cronies and all will be well.

The irony is that when it first opened in 1971, it reflected an optimistic vision of the future, or at least the future as its architect, Eb Zeidler, imagined it. At the same time as Zeidler was preparing his plans, Stanley Kubrick was giving us far out furniture on his 2001 space station and selling space travel as a glorified acid trip. The only thing missing from the original Ontario Place designs was a humongous lava lamp. It’s the kind of place you could go for a giant city-wide key party. The future was so much better back then.

In the Star Trek version of the future, Ontario Place is ground zero for a plague transmitted by photons. Once infected, victims crave light which of course produces photons and increases the likelihood of transmission. This futuristic plague’s version of masking is to turn out the lights. The only thing missing from this episode are the anti-darkness truckers who demand in the name of freedom the right to turn on the lights and infect their Enterprise crewmates. But I guess that would make it more like Toronto today than the Federation in stardate 2548.3.

Black and white photograph of Ontario Place buildings rising from the ice covered waters of a thawing Lake Ontario.
Ontario Place
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Architecture

Honest Eds

People cross Bloor Street during a snow storm in front of Honest Eds department store.
Honest Ed's Department Store, Bathurst/Bloor Intersection, Toronto

I’ve devoted the month of May to images that suggest ephemeral concerns, so it’s natural to suppose that when I present an image of an iconic Toronto landmark, now demolished, you might suppose I’m waxing nostalgic for a place I miss. It’s true. I miss the famous discount department store founded by Ed Mirvish. I miss the vibe it brought to the neighbourhood. I miss how it stood as an acknowledgement of the people who live here. The real people. The immigrants and students. It was absolutely analog. It resisted slick branding and social media campaigns. Sometimes that meant it was tacky as all shit. But, hey, if polished international brands are what you’re after, walk a kilometre east to the mink mile for your Gucci handbags and your Rolex watches.

But I’m not an overly nostalgic person. I’m more concerned with what’s in front of me than with what lies behind. In the case of Honest Eds, what lies in front is what towers overhead. Westbank and The Peterson Group purchased the site in 2014 and while they acknowledge the history of Mirvish Village and will include signs of that history in their new development, it is after all one more of countless residential/commercial developments popping up like mushrooms all over the city.

Toronto is a boom town. That boom started with the first Québec referendum when Montreal businesses, most notably financial institutions, fled the province for Toronto. It got a boost during the 2008 financial crisis when the world discovered that Canada’s more tightly regulated financial institutions, now all located in Toronto, had little exposure to dodgy credit instruments and so had weathered the storm relatively unscathed. More than ever, Toronto became an attractive place to park capital. Among other things, that influx of capital translated into new condo starts so that, by 2012, there were 148 cranes operating in the city. That pace has only accelerated. In 2021, there were 208 cranes operating in Toronto, almost as many as the combined total (276) of the other 14 North American cities in the survey.

Apart from the chaos of perpetual construction and infrastructure that can’t keep pace, the big downside of living in a skyscraper nursery is that all the buildings start to look the same. I find myself walking down a new condo canyon, all the familiar landmarks obliterated, and I can’t tell where I am anymore. I could be on one street. I could be on another street. Who knows? They all look the same to me.

I commend a short article by Aaron Betsky, “The Case for a New International Style.” He notes the trend to generic design in contemporary architecture influenced “by global flows of finance and culture, as well as by similarities in methods of production and standards”. While the influence of safety concerns arising from the pandemic has yet to play out in large projects, Betsky calls on the building industry to resist the temptation to what he calls “relentless value engineering”.

A word that comes to mind is “sterility.” While this word suggests a positive value in the context of health care and epidemiology with clean surfaces and filtered air, as an aesthetic value, it is soul deadening. I fear that much of Toronto’s built space is sterile in this latter sense. What I miss most about the demolition of Honest Eds is the way it disrupted urban space. It was the opposite of sterile.

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Architecture

Deer Park United Church is now the site of a Condo

Night photograph of a backhoe behind the remnants of a demolished church.
Excavation for new condo on the site of the former Deer Park United Church, St. Clair Avenue West, Toronto

Five years ago, I froze my keister while trying to capture the early stages of ground-breaking for a new condo in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood. The Blue Diamond Condominium project was going up on the site of the former Deer Park United Church at 129 St. Clair Ave. W. Demolition crews had lopped off the back half of the church building, but the new design would incorporate the front half of the church and the bell tower into a shiny glass structure. We call this practice façadism and it seems to be Toronto’s go-to solution whenever the city wants to claim it cares about heritage buildings without impeding the work of property developers.

While the newly constructed condominium tower sits toward the rear of the lot, the former church, or at least the remaining front half of the church, will become The Imperial, a luxury event space which opens this fall. The Imperial’s web site landing page shows a long dining table laid out for a formal dinner, as if waiting for the guests of the last supper, while in the background is a restored stained glass window. I wonder if anyone gave any thought to the name, The Imperial, and the historical ironies that name imports into this space.

The church is gone and, with it, a particular dream of what it means to be church. Deer Park began its life in 1881 as a Presbyterian congregation and constructed the building at 129 St. Clair Ave. W. in 1913. Twelve years later, most of the congregation voted to join of the United Church of Canada. At that time, the UCC had aspirations of becoming a national church, the religious equivalent of Tim Hortons. While it might seem like a wonderful thing, spreading happiness and unicorns all across the nation, such aspirations come with a cost. All through the post-war boom, with Sunday Schools bursting at the seams, churches had no incentive to think about that cost. But beginning in the 70’s, as membership numbers began a long slow decline, the UCC had to face serious issues like its role in the residential school system and its overwhelming whiteness in the midst of an increasingly diverse culture.

It seems problematic to rename this site The Imperial. At the very least, it ought to come with a plaque that offers an honest account of what went before. Although I was raised within the UCC, I feel no regret for its decline; on the contrary, I feel this is a just outcome. So it bothers me that what we choose to preserve of this “heritage site” is a vestige of its colonial and colonizing past. Wouldn’t it be nice to celebrate the dismantling of our colonial past with symbols that carry us into a more equitable future. Instead, we create a space that celebrates the cannibalistic tendencies of late capitalism. I wonder what kind of meals they serve at The Imperial.

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Architecture

Buildings that were but are no more

Night shot of a low building illuminated by a single street light.
Algoma Street South at Night - Thunder Bay

When I began sifting through my photo archive for images related to this month’s theme (what was but is no more), I was astonished at the number of buildings I have photographed that have later met with accelerant and a lit match. See my previous post on Notre Dame de Paris. I swear I had nothing to do with it. Today’s featured photo is a night shot of a building on Algoma Street South in Thunder Bay, ON. I shot this in May, 2016 and a few months later it was gone.

There have been a rash of fires in the vicinity. Two years ago, a building on Bay Street went up in flames. Before that, it was the Hells Angels clubhouse. And in December, the town lost the historic Finnish Labour Temple and, with it, the Hoito restaurant, located just around the corner from my lonely building featured here. There isn’t any evidence to suggest that these fires are connected. But when there are so many fires in close proximity, one does wonder.

As far as I’m aware, none of these fires resulted in injury or loss of life. Even so, each of them has been an occasion for grief, especially in the case of the Finnish Labour Temple, which had been a community hub for more than a century. There is something shocking about fire, something irrevocable. We do our best to clean up the site, but traces remain for years. We smell it in the soot. We see it in charred bits of wood.

Whenever I drive up to Thunder Bay, I see evidence of fire all along my route. In the town of Heyden, just north of the Sault, there’s Pruce’s Motor Inn lying in ruins, ironic given that the local fire station is just next door. And 20 km west of Nipigon was a gas station, abandoned for years, then torched to the ground. Further along, in Dorian, another motel was abandoned then torched, or torched then abandoned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which came first.

For a lot of sites in Northern Ontario, it’s typical simply to walk way. Let nature deal with the charred remnants. Snow melt and rain turn it into a black slurry. Seedlings hatch there. Moss and lichen creep over the exposed surfaces. In time—natural time, not human time—the burnt out buildings vanish beneath a layer of living matter, joining a larger cycle of decay and rebirth.

The Finnish Labour Temple and Hoito Restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ontario
The Hoito, Thunder Bay, Ontario (2015)
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Architecture

Notre-Dame de Paris

Interior shot of the Cathédral de Notre Dame, Paris
Interior shot of the Cathédral de Notre Dame, Paris

Continuing with the month of May’s theme of “what was but is no more” I offer a wide shot inside Notre-Dame de Paris beneath the site of the former spire. On April 15, 2019, the roof caught fire during renovations and, among other damages, this caused the central spire to collapse. Because it is a building of both religious and national importance, the French legislature resolved that, instead of modernizing the building, it should be restored to its former glory as a preeminent example of French Gothic architecture. Hopefully, the workers who perform the next renovation have better luck than the previous workers.

This calls to mind the Ship of Theseus paradox. First proposed by ancient Greek philosophers, the paradox asks what would happen if you replaced each piece of Theseus’s ship, board by board, until none of the original boards remained. Could you call the resulting ship the Ship of Theseus? Or would it be a new ship? We can pose the same problem in relation to the human body which is “refurbished” every 7 years. Can we say that we are the same person we were 7 years ago when our present body shares none of the physical material that comprised our former body? Memory gives us a sense of continuity, but memory may have no bearing on the problem of identity.

As for the Cathedral that stands on the Île de la Cité, I’m inclined to think it ceased being the Notre-Dame de Paris years ago, back when French society determined that it was a secular society that, among other things, would forbid Moslem women from wearing hijab in the public sphere. Theoretically, the same rules apply to the Cathedral at least to the extent that the Cathedral is a symbol of national secular pride. This makes for a very different building than the building which figures in Victor Hugo’s novel. If all it’s good for is to rouse politicians like Emmanuel Macron into fits of patriotism, why not burn it to the ground?