Toronto Offers Design Lessons for D.C.

[yyzer]

Interesting article by a Washington D.C. writer, from the Washington Business Journal....

Friday, November 13, 2009


Perspectives: Toronto offers design lessons for D.C.


Journal - by Benjamin Forgey Contributing Writer


A recent visit to Toronto got me thinking, rather ruefully, about recent architecture in Washington.

What got the thought process started was this: I was standing with my wife in a long line of folks waiting to get into the Art Gallery of Ontario on a pleasant weekday evening — “free Wednesdays,” our line-mates explained. (Other times the cost is $18 per!) The wait gave me plenty of time to contemplate the attractive, if ill-kept, row of 19th century dwellings on the opposite side of Dundas Street, a picturesque street parade in a minor key, not unlike many in D.C.

What is extraordinary about the view, however, is the way it is framed by the architecture of the new AGO (to use the familiar Toronto acronym for the gallery).

The institution hired native son Frank Gehry to expand and redesign its collection of attached buildings, each from a different architectural era, and Gehry’s main tactic to unify the disparate parts is a curving facade of glass and wood that rises 50 feet or so and sweeps dramatically along an entire city block. Supported by a muscular structure of wooden beams and struts, the facade is a wonderful piece of urban theater that provides cover, like a Renaissance arcade, and cubistically reflects sky and cityscape in its many glass facets. When you are standing or walking under it, this canopy’s long bottom edge provides a splendid upper frame for those 19th century buildings across the street, incorporating them into the urbane spectacle of the new architecture.

So, like many Gehry buildings around the world, this one inventively responds to its urban context. The new building does not match the nearby old ones in any way except, perhaps, in scale — not in style, materials, rhythm, mass, color, texture or anything else. Yet it complements its man-made and natural environment in intriguing and provocative ways. The building actually improves its context and makes you see it with fresh eyes. That is precisely where thoughts of D.C. come in.

Washington has a justified record of being a tough place to design in, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. Conceived and laid out as a capital, the city has matured beautifully in many ways. (And in many ways not, as pointed out in my last Perspectives column on Washington’s present-day planning.)

A certain deference to the city’s presence and symbolism — for instance, the height limit — is altogether to be expected. Still, the daunting review processes, involving numerous federal and local agencies and neighborhood bodies, can depress the creative impulse. NIMBY-ism flourishes here, as does a certain legalism that presumes there can be a procedural solution to every problem.

But it is the context question that caught my attention in Toronto. Context has been the predominant architectural issue in our capital city for at least three decades. There is no getting around the fact that in its approach to context the city’s design community (including clients, reviewing agencies and architects) is by and large stuck in the past.

This takes a bit of explaining. The reigning definition of context here emerged hand in hand with the historic preservation movement. In fact, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Washington architects were out in front of most others nationwide in responding to the multiple challenges — size, scale, style, texture, color, usage, you name it — of designing new buildings in historic contexts. Back then, this was the right and revolutionary thing to do. Modernism needed revising, and, in both theory and practice, a lot of good resulted from these powerful revisionist currents. Many good buildings and streets were saved, and a good deal of spirited architecture was produced. At its best, Washington architecture produced a sort of sophisticated middle way that emphasized the whole over the parts.

But there is no missing the fact that, when modernist architecture re-emerged in the 1990s as a tremendously re-energized, reconceptualized, multifaceted, worldwide engine of change, Washington architects just let it whistle on by. It’s almost as if a great cosmic switch had been thrown in the Washington sky urging caution above all — caution, caution, caution.

In the early 1980s, Washington’s brightest young architects habitually would begin a project by carefully photographing everything in the immediate vicinity and then, after careful study of the “context board,” design the building to fit in with the existing milieu. At the time, this was a liberating exercise, but in the long run it greatly over-emphasized the material and visual aspects of a given building site at the expense of other, more expansive themes such as spirituality, dynamism, symbolism, climate, movement, contrast and change itself.

This rather cautious interpretation of context did, however, commend itself to the city’s legions of historic preservationists and, especially, to the Historic Preservation Review Board, where a narrowly defined concept of compatibility was enshrined as the gold standard of design.

Washington architecture has pretty much remained in this conceptual and procedural trough right up to the present. Yes, there are first-rate architects practicing in the area who are responsive to fresh modernist currents — Hugh Newell Jacobsen (the “dean”), Shalom Baranes, Mark McInturff, Robert Gorney, Bill Bonstra, Suman Sorg, Travis Price and David Jameson, among others. But an awful lot of this design energy is spent on small-scale residential commissions. It’s almost as if, in D.C., the best place to be modern is to hide behind lots of leafy trees.

And, yes, there are exceptions such as Philip Esocoff who combine the modern and the traditional in a delicious, idiosyncratic blend. Yes, the old Historic Preservation Review Board also has loosened up a bit, broadening its idea of compatibility to include the occasional dose of contrast.

But, still, the whole process can be so burdensome and inhibitory. At a meeting of the review board not long ago I witnessed a remarkable takedown of a McInturff design for a small addition to the rear of a house in Cleveland Park — the architect had the temerity to envision an all-glass corner offering a striking view of backyard trees. No, no, no, he was told, that doesn’t fit. The pretty glass corner was just a teeny bit visible from the sidewalk, you see, and thereby constituted a threat to the “integrity” (a word one hears a lot at such meetings) of the historic district. Clearly, this was a minor event, but I couldn’t help thinking at the time that such exchanges definitely have a depressing multiplier effect.

Nor, back in Toronto, could I help recalling that little incident while standing underneath Gehry’s gloriously inclusive canopy. McInturff’s window, in its low-key way, also embraced ever-changing light and also was an attempt to acknowledge the past, the present and the future. That’s what contextual design ought to be about in big buildings, little buildings and in-betweeners — about respecting the past, to be sure, but also about challenging it, about ringing in the future.

Gehry’s AGO building is a tour-de-force of inside-outside surprises. The long, high, narrow sculpture gallery directly behind that glass and wood facade is an astonishing space, not only because of its unusual dimensions and dramatically exposed structure but also because it is both stage and auditorium for the theater of daily life. A visitor there is both actor and observer. And the long, corkscrew stairwells attached to the front and back facades of the “gallery tower” in the rear of the new addition provide multiple places to pause for magnificent views of the city and sky in between visits to the contemporary galleries.

It’s quite a combination: art, movement and everyday life. In fact, Gehry’s whole career could be interpreted as a succession of seriously playful and intensely inventive engagements with the differing contexts of cities around the world — including Washington, where his wonderful wavy Corcoran addition did not get built. (I should stress: The reasons were financial, not regulatory.)

But, hey, we’re in Toronto, so let’s take advantage of the opportunity to look at two more big new buildings that challenge conventional notions of context. Right around the AGO corner is Will Alsop’s astonishing, apparitional building for the Ontario College of Art and Design — a huge, horizontal, checkerboard box raised 90 feet in the air on multicolored concrete stilts. One might say that Alsop, with cartoonish legerdemain (Jetsons, anyone?), simply ignores the context, or rises above it. But the building is not a joke. It looks great and reinforces the idea that cities are generators of resourcefulness and ingenuity.

I can’t say that I’m equally taken with Daniel Libeskind’s angular addition to the Royal Ontario Museum. It looks almost arbitrary, like an accidental collision between a frumpy old stone building and a Mach 5 speed UFO. But indubitably it does accomplish two of the architect’s stated aims: to intensify the relationship “between history and the new, between tradition and innovation,” and to turn the prominent corner of Bloor Street and Queens Park into “a veritable showcase of people, events and objects.”

To change is not easy, but there is a lesson here for Washington’s contextual community — including regulators, bureaucrats and developers, as well as designers: Loosen up.

[threnody]

If he was looking for out-of-context architecture he came to the right place. I've personally come to enjoy the near-random juxtaposition of different architectural styles, but I can understand why others aren't thrilled about it.

It sounds like DC is extremely conservative on this point. Even something as lovely and contextually respectful as the National Ballet could be rejected for having too much glass.

[wyliepoon]

In the early 1980s, Washington’s brightest young architects habitually would begin a project by carefully photographing everything in the immediate vicinity and then, after careful study of the “context board,” design the building to fit in with the existing milieu.

Interestingly enough the "context board" approach is still taught to architecture students today in Toronto, for example at Ryerson. I think most architecture students these days, by instinct, do photograph "everything in the immediate vicinity" of their site, and then later try to justify how their designs fit into that context.