Whoaccio
Senior Member
Bah, a ferris wheel, how preposterous! We all know the only logical vanity project is for Toronto to build a giant nickel! Either that or a skyscraper made of popsicle sticks.
We're a mature enough city to absorb all kinds of new forms, and the approaches we've taken on our different cultural buildings strike me as quite appropriate. The opera company doesn't need circus barker architecture to make the tour buses screech to a halt, so that thousands of people can be enticed through their doors from morning to night - so they didn't employ it. Large cultural institutions - the AGO and the ROM, for instance - do need to attract the masses, so visually louder forms suit their requirements nicely. The look of the Sharp Centre nicely captures the values that a design school teaches, and the form attracts design students from all over the world to study there.
Screw giant ferris wheels. Let's build the worlds largest, glass enclosed roller coaster along the waterfront. Take the same looking pods you'll find on the london eye, attach those to some tracks and have them speed through the downtown skyscrapers. Now there's an attraction!
I wont ever buy into the false dichotomy that asking for the 4SC to be more than it is, is asking for circus-barker architecture The building doesn't go far enough for what it is - though it would have been a perfectly lovely public pool.
I don't want some silly glass enclosed roller coaster speeding through downtown skyscrapers as an attraction.