Tewder
Senior Member
As I've pointed out several times on this thread, Tewder, classical revival was of its time, culturally, but we're not living in the eighteenth century any more. I've never said there is anything wrong with being inspired by the past, merely that nobody in Toronto's creative community is apparently channelling Vitruvius or Phideus these days.
...but this is my point exactly: the fact that there are people in Toronto now who are channeling modernism and deco (in all artistic mediums) implies that there is something in those styles that is 'of our time' now, culturally, in the same way that there was something in the revivalism of classical Greece that was clearly of the time of the Georgians.
There's no actual law against producing faux - it is the comfortable and nostalgic architectural comfort food of our day - but why make a fetish of trying to pass it off as something more important than it is? To all intents and purposes it is irrelevant as a creative force, and Zephyr is right to question the legitimacy of the form of "revival" that 1 St Thomas represents
...but then Clewes is 'comfort food' too, as you say of Stern. Clewes' revisiting of the aesthetics of modernism is nothing original and says no more about us now than does the work of Stern who is merely revisiting yet another past aesthetic. Again, no crime. I love the work of Clewes in the city, but as a pure architectural form (which is to say devoid of any cultural connotations) it doesn't say anything more than was already said more eloquantly and with more originality, by Mies et al.
None of this is to say that one may not legitimately and fairly prefer Clewes, as indeed I most certainly do. What I, and others here, are arguing is that to justify the liking of one over the other on the basis of originality is problematic as in fact, at heart, they are both inspired by the aesthetics of previous eras.