From:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...ry/TPNational/
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ARCHITECTURE WAS SOMETHING THE CITY USED TO FEAR
LISA ROCHON
These days, in the city of Toronto, architecture is understood as a major transformer. At times, large-scale urban design has taken on a spectacular dimension, delivered as a jaw-dropping provocation, an object to behold, the latest, stupefying commodity. But public architecture also resides more quietly, enduringly, within the deep folds of a city's fabric, in that zone of the glorious in-between. It is found in life-sustaining libraries and in community centres that invite openness and tolerance and a just society. It is there within exquisitely crafted houses set like minimal slivers amid rows of Victorian housing. These are the places of profound city building, where trophy architecture rarely goes but where much of the exalted state of any urban renaissance lies. For the civic art of architecture in Toronto, we owe much to our own talented architects and even the next generation of designers.
"I consider myself a beneficiary of [Toronto's] cultural commitment to architecture," says Donald Chong, a University of Toronto architecture graduate, who recently launched Donald Chong Studio. To Chong, the recent renaissance in Toronto has provided a necessary balance between private developments and cultural building. "It makes me believe that architecture is still a real route in making cities, and that it's not just about design features used by speculative developments."
The culture of architecture matters in Toronto: Patrons of the arts and members of academia have presented themselves to the cause in droves.
There is something particular to Toronto's culture of architecture, including, as it does, students who are being mentored at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design and hired into practices such as Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, Shim-Sutcliffe Architects and Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, to name but three. "I've found that in other cities such as Chicago, Boston, Vancouver, there isn't the camaraderie or even the legacy that you find in Toronto," notes Chong. "More and more, I've realized Toronto is a place of nurturing and mentorship."
There is that, and there is also this: the city's reinvention. Although tempting to do so, Torontonians needn't flatter themselves by imagining the world has engaged in endless chatter about their city's so-called cultural renaissance. Many within global circles of architecture know that something of major proportions is emerging here. But the true impact of the work has created barely a ripple.
A measure, then, of what is about to be unveiled to the world: Does Toronto's collective body of new architecture break new ground for technical and aesthetic innovation? No. Not when compared to Frank Gehry's unparalleled work of audacity delivered for the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain (1997), or his ability to sculpt a conference room in the shape of a horse's head for Berlin's DG Bank (2001). Not when compared to British wünder-architect Norman Foster's glass dome, which redefined the German parliament in Berlin's Reichstag, a polemic intervention entirely powered by renewable sources of energy.
Even the star architects themselves are reluctant to sing the praises of their Toronto work -- once they step outside the city, that is. The Art Gallery of Ontario's $254-million redevelopment has been conspicuously absent in recent books on Frank Gehry. And Daniel Libeskind failed to mention his $244-million makeover of the Royal Ontario Museum during a talk last year in Muenster, Germany.
We live in an era of excess. So, it's hardly surprising that six cultural institutions are being reinvented in Toronto at the present time. The city has been blessed by a megawatt effort, contained within a few dozen city blocks. Combined with major building at the University of Toronto by talented local architects and foreign stars, there's an enviable dose of riches and brainpower operating in the downtown core.
Forty years ago, architectural monuments, here and elsewhere, arrived one at a time. In 1956, Toronto mayor Nathan Phillips, an early supporter of the new City Hall, launched an international design competition that was ultimately won by Finnish architect Viljo Revell; French president Georges Pompidou spearheaded the international competition and construction of one of the world's most provocative cultural works, Beaubourg, or the Pompidou Centre (1978), by the architects Renzo Piano of Italy and Richard Rogers of England.
At the dawn of the 21st century, there is a smorgasbord of styles to choose from in Toronto. What unites the new builds is an interest in body architecture: See how the body is glorified in the double-height dance studios at Canada's National Ballet School. Watch it become the object of desire on the glass stairs behind the glass wall at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. For the Art Gallery of Ontario, on the second-floor viewing gallery lined with Douglas fir, Frank Gehry has given the body a magnificent space to strut through and be noticed in from Dundas Street. And the body can expect to be exposed, possibly even caressed, by the catwalks and sharply angled walls within the new public spaces at the Royal Ontario Museum.
Though unfair to contrast the grands projets of another French president, François Mitterrand, by which Paris was further transformed in the eighties and nineties, to the cultural build-up of Toronto, there is at least one apt comparison to make between Carlos Ott, architect of Paris's new opera house, and Toronto architect Jack Diamond, creator of Toronto's new home for opera, the Four Seasons Centre. Like Ott, Diamond resents the star system of architects. Ott, like Diamond, set out to create a building and not a monument -- an opera for the people.
There are differences between the Paris and Toronto opera houses: the Opéra de la Bastille cost $400-million (U.S.) when it finally opened in 1990, and its main hall seats 2,700. In Toronto, the Four Seasons Centre will cost an estimated $181-million and provide a relatively intimate auditorium of 2,000 seats. Neither is intended as a place of aesthetic transport. Ott's facility is a machined apparatus that gives away nothing, on the outside, of the theatricality of opera. A similar strategy has been used by Diamond who, together with Diamond + Schmitt Architects, has designed the project as a brick building that could be confused from three of its sides as a vast loft or even a shopping mall: The facility's one exhilarating conceit is a monumental glass curtain wall that rises up from its University Avenue sidewalk.
The test of extravagance with any such space is whether it inspires the turning of a pirouette. Best forget it here -- the goal at the Four Seasons Centre is to privilege the serious business inside the hall, providing exceptional acoustics and clear sightlines. It's a no-nonsense game.
Had Mitterand's French socialist government been responsible for marketing the cultural renaissance of Toronto, the SuperBuild fund would have been launched as the compelling story of building a new society. The French president spun his grands projets as an initiative befitting a government of builders, a concept that was debated every day during the 1980s in most of the daily French newspapers. And has since gone down in history. Here, by contrast, although the SuperBuild initiative has helped finance hundreds of projects across Ontario and embraced a variety of programs, little importance has been attached to the government's role in fostering excellence in architecture -- and even less attention has been given to the province's vision for creating sophisticated, reinvented cities.
Architecture was something this city used to fear. Now, through regular exposure, the public has become a more discriminating and demanding client.
Jack Lang, French minister of culture under President Mitterrand, once declared that architecture is not an expression of a society but an expression of the powers that direct it. Mitterrand himself believed that the government required time to accomplish its cultural project: One cannot construct anything strong and new according to the rhythm imposed by developers and speculators.
A civilization is judged by its architecture. Of this, I have no doubt.