Post: Architects veer away from 'car crash' design

[Archivist]

I'm surprised to hear you rail at computers and their impact on buildings. Building have always been affected by technological innovation. Spire wouldn't exist without innovations like elevators and steel frame construction, and, really, what is Spire but a paean to these technologies? Surely the abandonment of load-bearing masonry walls for all buildings was regretted by some at the time, but we've all gotten used to it and just look at the beauty, transparency (and height!) it's given us.

All buildings constructed now seem self-evidently to me to be built by computer. At any rate, given that this is so, what you really seem to be calling for is to use new technologies, but to limit their use to mimicking what was possible before. How odd! How unnecessary!

And when I first saw the Guggenheim at the end of a dullish Spanish street, on a sunny day, with a hill beyond and cows dotted over it - a perfect vessel for modern art - I wept at the sight. And not because it was gimmicky, but because it was so damned beautiful. Your call for computers to be used, but only insofar as their use is consistent in creating a building that looks like it might have been constructed, say, during the 1960's, is unfortunate.

 

[Urban Shocker]

There's a visually loud look that the possibilities of computer software has enabled - the unfortunate "car crash" design that this thread's about. The American university president in the article craves it for his institution, and it's a status look akin to pretentious trophy residences like 1 St.Thomas. Restricted mostly to expensive cultural showcases, it hasn't replaced Modernism as a basis for designing the spaces in which most of us live our lives, especially locally where our design culture has strong Modernist roots and a healthy disdain for spectacle.

 

[Tewder]

I'm surprised to hear you rail at computers and their impact on buildings. Building have always been affected by technological innovation.

Agreed. All design is affected in this way. Popularist modernism owes a lot to plastics after all. In fact if you look at post-war modernism not so much as the triumph of a style that somehow transcends all others but as one that is accessible to the average Joe through mass production we may get a little closer to understanding its enormous influence.

Locally, there is a continuity with the design culture that produced our post-WW2 Modernist buildings that has none of the "revivalist" spirit that Tewder claims to see. If a "revival" was underway there would have to have been something to come between us and our earlier Modernists - and there hasn't been. We're mainlining it still - the article in this section of the forum about self-described Modernist Heather Dubbeldam's recent house renovation ( she worked for KPMB, who in turn started at Barton Myers ... ) makes it clear that the values that inform Modernist design solutions are passed from generation to generation without interruption, and result in resolutely contemporary solutions.

I do agree US that modernism has ushered in a whole new aesthetic language that's now forever a part of the design lexicon, and in this way the revivalist spirit is not quite the same. That said, I still feel that where some new buildings are pushing this language further in ways that speak to us in the here and now some other examples are pure mid-century kitsch that do little more than appeal to a nostalgia for a pre-grunge era of martinis and 'rat pack' hipness.

 

[ganjavih]

...especially locally where our design culture has strong Modernist roots and a healthy disdain for spectacle.

I wish Toronto didn't have such a disdain for spectacle. However, I'm not sure I completely agree that it does. I would argue that modesty in Toronto's architecture is due more to penny-pinching than a true disdain for spectacle.

 

[Urban Shocker]

I think it is mostly an expression of who we are as a culture. Toronto is catalytic in nature - we negotiate our various ways with the minimum of interference - it's a practical, long-standing cultural pact that has allowed an industrious immigrant town to rise to prominence. In a way, we were the Dubai of early 19th century Ontario - physically located in the right spot as a crossroads for commerce, enhanced by our success in edging out other centres as a seat of power. Historically, Toronto wasn't required to throw tantrums to become Canada's major cultural and economic centre - hard work and low-key subterfuge worked just fine, and we rose. Thrift, and modesty of expression rather than extravagance, reflected our provincial status as a government town. Our architecture hasn't needed to be showy either - it's practical and gets the job done based on what works; we have a strong design culture ( the third or fourth largest design centre on the continent ) that isn't a simulacrum of someone else's culture; our tolerance is based on cross-cultural exchanges that shun the melting-pot approach; people are permitted not to opt in if they don't want to, that sort of thing.

 

[simply Dan]

I would argue that modesty in Toronto's architecture is due more to penny-pinching than a true disdain for spectacle.

Although Canadians have got to be the cheapest people in the Western world, I think Toronto’s modernist design aesthetic is more reflective of this city being a big business no-nonsense conservative northern burg than anything else. Our civic heritage frowned on unnecessary spectacle, which is still evident today by the distain so many have for the “frills” of the ROM Crystal or the “sillyness” of the OCAD tabletop.

 

[Tewder]

I suppose that may be so but the contradictions are everywhere. US makes a good case about Toronto's conservative tradition but I'm not sure how you explain the existance of street upon street of gothic revival follies and Victorian extravagance that once dominated vernacular styles, as well as the exuberant confidence and spectacle consistently displayed in public buildings all over the city from Old City Hall (and New City Hall for that matter) to the Sunnyside Bathing Pavillion, from Casa Loma to the Commerce Court tower or the old Simpson's/Bay store on Yonge, and so on? I see Toronto as always having been a moderately optimistic and ambitious place, in a reserved British sort of way at least, that in latter years just seemed to have burned out on its own ambition. Priorities have shifted and changed for more recent generations who wanted social tolerance and welfare over castles and scrapers. Not a bad thing obviously, but there's probably more room now for a bit of both. Bread and circuses, so to speak.

 

[Urban Shocker]

Mock Goth was the official house style of the British Empire - and the resurgent Church that wrote the soundtrack for it - so of course there was plenty of it here.

 

[Tewder]

Yes, but it was also part of a more widespread wave of cultural nostalgia for a pre-industrial age: think Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris" in literature, and Viollet-le-Duc in architecture/restoration...

Interestingly though this 'wave' didn't seem to have a huge impact on the USA, culturally speaking. There are numerous examples to be found there of course (St. Patrick's in NY, the Smithsonian Building in Washington etc), but design there was moving forward in ways that expressed the emerging spirit and identity of America. This was not the case in Canada which to a large extent remained, and still does, somewhat colonial in outlook and spirit, multiculturalism stepping in for the 'mother countries' of England and France for cultural inspiration. Modernism seems to be a nice bright break from this, as far as I can tell anyway, and I hope we see more.

 

[Archivist]

I support Tewder's connection of architecture to larger events and cultural trends. However, the "home style" of the US insofar as it affects many of its official government buildings, many homes, and no small number of cultural institutions, in my view, no less colonial than ours - they simply looked to classical Greek predecessors to capture the spirit of their emerging democracy - a style they have adopted so strongly that by this time it might as well be theirs.

 

[Urban Shocker]

Before they kicked the British out, American colonists were obviously influenced by their architecture. When the Georges were on the throne, the colonists built appropriately Georgian buildings - with the sort of local variations you'd expect to see. After 1776, they saw their country, minted in the Age of Reason, as the new Athens - and plucked Classical as the house style of the new republic. The English, who saw their Gothic heritage as an expression of a national culture and values - in contrast to Classicism, which they came to associate with corruption - were reviving it, and it became the house style of their rapidly expanding evangelical Christian empire. Americans had no Gothic heritage to revive, of course, and were unlikely to ape their former masters in doing so - particularly since they had already gone gaga for the Classical. They incorporated Gothic later.

 

[Tewder]

Yes, I sometimes get neo-gothic and gothic revival mixed up. In Canada gothic revival is a latter style of institutional building, mid to late nineteenth century, with frenchified pepper-pot roofs in Quebec and faux medieval turrets in Ontario. It is more emblematic of romantic Victorian fantasy than of colonial styles per se. Trends in the Canadian colony were fairly similar to those in the pre-revolutionary American colonies, Georgian and Regency in particular. There is a wonderful example in Queeston, Ontario:

Of course there is Dundern in Hamilton:

Fairfield House near Kingston is typical of the era:

Nelles Manor in Grimsby is one of a few 18th century stone buildings left:

 

[dulapul]

Hello, I know that this can sound provocative but I can’t stop myself to notice that the “high disdain for spectacle “has a strong “moral order†nuance, a quasi-religious ideological content that I don’t think has a place in civic-urban life. Is more a disdain of quality or disdain of the effort to push the crafting-building-architectural process beyond the strictly minimum utilitarian level. I feel that this rejection of so called “spectacle-frill-car crash design†throws out the baby with the water bath. There is a lot of non-sense but there is a lot of good sense, too, cultural-social good sense to find. It is possible to be very “efficient†in a way and build much more meaningful buildings within the same means.

 

[Urban Shocker]

"Gothic Revival" and "Neo Gothic" are terms for the same thing.

I rather like the somewhat piss-taking "Mock Goth" - a term one of my art school teachers, Marion MacRae, used. Her book about Ontario church architecture, Hallowed Walls, is a fine primer on our local styes, and full of little gems of quirky information. For instance, it was quite the done thing at one time to disfigure perfectly handsome local Regency churches by updating their windows with Goth arches - it threw the proportions all off, unfortunately, but that didn't prevent it from being done. Marion, who died last year, also wrote MacNab of Dundurn and worked closely with architect, author and teacher Anthony Adamson on several books.

 

[adma]

Our civic heritage frowned on unnecessary spectacle, which is still evident today by the distain so many have for the “frills†of the ROM Crystal or the “sillyness†of the OCAD tabletop.

Are you sure there wouldn't be similar disdain in other burgs, even supposedly more "sophisticated" ones like New York or London? I'm sure an OCAD-equivalent there would bring out a whole lot of Prince-Charles-gone-berzerk blog comments, too...