CanadianNational
Senior Member
I'd sign based on my love of your avatar, save for the fact that you've neglected my point.
No one on record, save for the die-hard chintz-and-Royal Doulton crowd loves the Cheddington, which would fall under the architectural radar anywhere in the world.
Modernistic 'glass skin' buildings - are themselves pastiches, ripoffs, carry-ons, borrowings, continuations and references to buildings and ideas that are now nearly one hundred years old. That's the start of a tradition or habit, but not the same thing as a current or binding truth.
They are based on a World War One-era assembly-line punch-pressed modernism, that has had the foundation knocked out from under it by architects like Libeskind, Gehry and Hadid, who have recognized that the heir of earlier industrial modernism is the computer, not the factory, and have pulled modernism fractured and flowing into the modern age.
Glass boxes are old buildings wearing newer, tighter miracle fabrics.
A Clewsian skyscraper is no more authentically capital-M Modern than Cinderella's castle at Disneyland is authentically antique. Toronto has plenty of modern - and modernistic precedents, 'tis true. This includes buildings like Commerce Court North and College Park, which the vocabulary on 1 St. Thomas is very close to.
Modernism in architecture, like modernism in art, is a tree with plenty of branches. To name a few in art: Vorticism, Suprematism, Cubism, Orphism, Precisionist, Abstract Expressionism, Realism, Formalism, Installation.....all still going, all partaking of the same root. The chide, compete with and compliment each other, but all exist, validly. The evidence of modernism is more evident in the need to categorize and delineate than in any tremendous difference between one school or practice and the other.
Stern is far from a fauxmonger. He is far too skilled for that. He does deal in faux, though - but depending on your definition, so could just about everyone. Especially any architect ever constrained or liberated by a budget.
Before you think that I have some sort of sympathy for him as a person - no way. But if he stands on the shoulders of multiple architectural stylists? - big deal. Especially if he's doing their hair, so to speak, with style. Clewes is wetly kissing Mies' ass, and I don't hear anyone raising a stink.
As for marketing around modernism, as I hinted - checked out the prices on Mr. Meier's deluxe minimal Chelsea towers? Proof, as Mr. Wolfe wrote about so well in From Bauhaus To Our House, that tremendous irony abounds out there in this zany world of ours.
1 St. Thomas is not one of my favourite buildings. But I will defend it from being pelted with verbal tomatoes for now, because it's a pleasing confection. I think it has a right to happily exist.
Anyhoo, I'll beg off. I've said all this and more, better, earlier....and nothing's more dreary than trying to evangelize online. (grin)
No one on record, save for the die-hard chintz-and-Royal Doulton crowd loves the Cheddington, which would fall under the architectural radar anywhere in the world.
Modernistic 'glass skin' buildings - are themselves pastiches, ripoffs, carry-ons, borrowings, continuations and references to buildings and ideas that are now nearly one hundred years old. That's the start of a tradition or habit, but not the same thing as a current or binding truth.
They are based on a World War One-era assembly-line punch-pressed modernism, that has had the foundation knocked out from under it by architects like Libeskind, Gehry and Hadid, who have recognized that the heir of earlier industrial modernism is the computer, not the factory, and have pulled modernism fractured and flowing into the modern age.
Glass boxes are old buildings wearing newer, tighter miracle fabrics.
A Clewsian skyscraper is no more authentically capital-M Modern than Cinderella's castle at Disneyland is authentically antique. Toronto has plenty of modern - and modernistic precedents, 'tis true. This includes buildings like Commerce Court North and College Park, which the vocabulary on 1 St. Thomas is very close to.
Modernism in architecture, like modernism in art, is a tree with plenty of branches. To name a few in art: Vorticism, Suprematism, Cubism, Orphism, Precisionist, Abstract Expressionism, Realism, Formalism, Installation.....all still going, all partaking of the same root. The chide, compete with and compliment each other, but all exist, validly. The evidence of modernism is more evident in the need to categorize and delineate than in any tremendous difference between one school or practice and the other.
Stern is far from a fauxmonger. He is far too skilled for that. He does deal in faux, though - but depending on your definition, so could just about everyone. Especially any architect ever constrained or liberated by a budget.
Before you think that I have some sort of sympathy for him as a person - no way. But if he stands on the shoulders of multiple architectural stylists? - big deal. Especially if he's doing their hair, so to speak, with style. Clewes is wetly kissing Mies' ass, and I don't hear anyone raising a stink.
As for marketing around modernism, as I hinted - checked out the prices on Mr. Meier's deluxe minimal Chelsea towers? Proof, as Mr. Wolfe wrote about so well in From Bauhaus To Our House, that tremendous irony abounds out there in this zany world of ours.
1 St. Thomas is not one of my favourite buildings. But I will defend it from being pelted with verbal tomatoes for now, because it's a pleasing confection. I think it has a right to happily exist.
Anyhoo, I'll beg off. I've said all this and more, better, earlier....and nothing's more dreary than trying to evangelize online. (grin)