Wonderful post Archivist. You've laid out a good point of departure for us to narrow in on the issue, and in reading your post some ideas come to mind:
"1) The idea and concept of the style must be a shared phenomen, that is, it must be accepted by a group of people as having a shared meaning..."
- Historically speaking, a "style" or "school" is often not truly identified and/or recognized as such until after the fact, when a little wider perspective may be possible, so this lack of an existing consensus to which you refer may simply imply that it is a little premature for the notion of a "Toronto School" (I prefer this term), and how it may be defined, to have clearly entered our collective conscience. That said, I do think this discussion is timely as there definately seem to be rumblings, however sporadic, that this notion is slowly emerging. So, in this quest for a definition I think we must take some leap of faith in acknowledging that although not widespread there seem to be some signs that are compelling enough to at least warrant this idea.
"2) The style must be definable in language, it can’t exist only in the eye of the beholder without it being a Tweedledum phenomenon. Unfortunately, this is where I find the discussion most lacking. I've run through the posts and gathered some elements together..."
I prefer the notion of a "Toronto School" to that of a "Toronto Style" because I think that a school implies more of a socio-cultural and socio-historic phenomenon, rather than a purely aesthetic one. When talking of the Group of Seven for instance, or the 'Impressionists', it would be fairly easy to point out that there are more differences in the aesthetic of the different artists within the school than there may be similarities, though similarities exist nonetheless. So again, for the purposes of a definition I think we should be looking less for the strict characteristics of a pure aesthetic style as such, and more for defining aesthetic signifiers and signs, and the shared historic, social and cultural phenomenon that inform them.
"It's not useful to indicate that the Toronto style is found mostly in Toronto. And it's hardly helpful to define the Toronto style as that of this or that particularly architectural firm that is based in Toronto. For such a definition to be useful, I would want it to help me make distinctions between "leading" or truly Toronto-style architects and the Burkas/Grazianas/EIRichmonds of the city. So, clearly it is going to have to do so without reference to the work of particular firms."
- Further to my suggestions above, I would argue that the notion of a Toronto School should not be limited to local architects. In this age of "starchitects", globalism and international design competitions it would be nigh on impossible, and certainly futile, to seek to circumscribe a definition so tightly, and the fact that the work of a foreign architect may be common and popular elsewhere, even perhaps 'seminal' in other contexts, should not preclude it from being part of our definition of the Toronto School. As such, I would suggest it could be argued that works as seemingly disparate as the Diamond's FSC Opera House, Gehry's redesign of the AGO, Mies Van der Rohe's TD Centre, and Revell's NPS could be considered to be of the Toronto School, even though the architects themselves may not be.
"The Toronto style seems unlikely to include the work of all Toronto architects or their buildings, or even the majority, and if not then I'd suggest dropping any “Toronto†references from the definition."
- Indeed it would be impossible and futile to seek to represent all Toronto architects and all Toronto buildings in any definition. We must be careful to limit our notion of a school or style to a fairly specific timeframe, as clearly there are other pre-existing Toronto styles that were perhaps equally significant in their time and place; for instance, the predominance of the neo-gothic in early Toronto residential and civic building.
"I’d suggest that your definition should be useful to segregate not just Toronto buildings into categories of “Toronto Style†vs. “Could be anywhereâ€, but that it must also be sufficiently durable to distinguish Toronto neo-modernism from its counterparts in other cities."
AND:
"The second thing would be to test run the definition against buildings from other cities, since the definition loses all meaning if it does not distinguish Toronto buildings from those in other cities."
I think this is where we must be allowed the sin, or narcissism, of self-reference here: Whether the Toronto style or school is recognized or acknowledge beyond our civic border should be of little concern, as should whether buildings we might consider of the Toronto style existing elsewhere be. In other words, the fact that Second Empire buildings exist all around the world does not necessarily diminish the fact that Parisians may collectively view this as an essentially French style, school or movement.
