1 St Thomas (Lee Development, 29s, Stern)

[CanadianNational]

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)

 

[yyzer]

Some nights I just love this forum...

I think the core of the argument comes from this point by Zephyr:

The original argument from my point of view was never about beauty, but over what the architecture represents to Toronto.

What the architecture represents to Toronto.

My position is simpler - why not just appreciate it, for what it is, in itself? Why not experience the art (the building) openly, as the artist intended?

When you add the idea of what any architecture represents, you get away from the visceral appreciation of the piece, and you enter into an intellectual exercise, no? I am open to discussion.

 

[junctionist]

So really, the tribute bands of mainstream acts detract for our current local art scene (to continue with the earlier analogy). They're no fault in being influenced by past forms and that kind of work is most relevant in today's society and meaningful, but to rely on it exclusively for one's act isn't positive. I like the occasional tribute act and the art can be solid and very enjoyable, but we have to prioritize new work that isn't bland and flat, but filled with nuances (whether that work is minimalist or ornate).

More Feist, less Elevation.

 

[CanadianNational]

This is a bit blind-men-and-the-elephant-ish, aint' it?
Anyhoo, in IMO, 'what the architecture represents to Toronto', is rather dependent on the era, person, group, class or community consulted, and all those will continuously shift, at any rate.
It'd be interesting to try and find out, but I don't imagine how it could be done. The base terms of analysis would be tremendously wide-ranging and complex, the variables multitudinous, and the result mutable.

 

[MisterF]

Equating this thing to the Arc de Triomphe - which was built by a French Emperor to celebrate military victories in an age of absolute monarchy and dictatorship, when leaders like Napoleon and Catherine the Great modelled their empires on those of ancient Greece and Rome and the leading architects and artists drew on that past for inspiration - is ludicrous. Who nowadays, in Toronto's creative community, is channelling Vitruvius or Phideus?

So it's only okay when everyone else is doing it...

 

[Redroom Studios]

The most pleasing thing that I'm taking away from all this is that our part of the world has certainly done a good job of turning out well educated and well spoken souls. Great intelligent discussion, though unfortunately becoming a bit personal at times.

I still feel compelled to take the argument back to an existential level though... we all need somewhere to eat, shit and sleep. Apparently enough people have chosen 1 St Thomas to fulfill these purposes that it can be called a success. Just my over-arching take on it all... but then again some people might suggest that I am clinically depressed... what's the point anyway...

LOL!

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Very creative blame game. If you disagree you are dredging it up. Give me a break.

The thread was dormant until someone posted some updated pics of the tower & townhomes, and then guess who posted next?

I don't care that the argument was revived - I basically started it, after all - but did you think you'd be able to jump in the ring to throw one last informed punch, proclaim everything after that groundless rehashings, and then not get called on it?

 

[adma]

Given the context of what is happening in contemporary architecture, the stylistic rear view mirror approach of a building like 1 St. Thomas is about as relevant as Edwardian Baroque was in the age of Art Nouveau, regardless of which big name American architect did it or how lavish the materials used. Given the nostalgia-based pastiche it embodies, I'm not even sure the word 'design' could properly be used to describe the process that produced something like this.

Ah, but time and pluralism has its last laugh: the "nostalgia-based pastiche" that is Edwardian Baroque is now deemed heritage-worthy alongside (NOTE: "alongside", not "in place of") Art Nouveau and High Modern and whatever else.

Indeed, to deny such architecture's heritage worth on grounds of its being "nostalgia-based pastiche" is, these days, a kind of nostalgia-based pastiche in its own right: a pastiche of High Modernist hubris...

Yet for all that, I'm still reserving myself from using (except w/once-removed irony) loaded potboiler terms like "gorgeous" to describe 1ST...

 

[balmoral]

As a constant lurker and occassional poster, I have to say that this 1 St Thomas thread has bothered me immensely.

I've attempted to start a discourse on this building vis a vis the following:

1. Stern's 15 Central Park West: unarguably the most successful (financially-speaking) new development in NYC in the last 30 years. The favorable critical reaction Stern's building has received in NY, combined with its undeniable financial success, I thought served as an interesting contrast to Toronto's reaction to 1 St. Thomas (unarguably our most comperable development). I received virtually no reaction/commentary to my post.

2. An interview with Stern in the NY Observer, and how his attitudes/inspirations apply to both 1 St. Thomas and Toronto in general (not to mention his "appreciation" of GWB!). Again, zero reaction.

Perhaps this lack of intelligent (not to mention noticable!) reaction is a result of my infrequent posts, but the amount of traction the dismissal of 1 St. Thomas has received solely because it is inspired by a previous generation frustrates me to no end. The reality is that 98% of all new development in Toronto can be straightlined to a prior era; unfortunately, only 2% are on par with the penultimate project they rip off. No matter your opinion of a) Stern, b) 1 St. Thomas or c) the era he took inspiration from, you cannot dispute that this is the most "authentic" (and high quality) existing development in Toronto. For posters such as Urban Shocker (I admire your dedication - but does your employer know you spend 17 hours/day on this board?), please explain to me why Clewes' X Condo is any different than 1 St. Thomas, other than a 30 year difference in inspiration/derivative point?

 

[Zephyr]

The thread was dormant until someone posted some updated pics of the tower & townhomes, and then guess who posted next?
... did you think you'd be able to jump in the ring to throw one last informed punch, proclaim everything after that groundless rehashings, and then not get called on it?

So much for the great revelation. Don't you think your particular agenda is patently obvious by now? That take of yours was just as predictable as anyone else on this thread, and its timing could be used to set a clock. It is not that you are above any of this, you reinforce it.

Isn't it clear by now that calling me on anything is not a fear of mine? And I am not so naive as to think that anyone, myself included, will get the final word on this thread. Once again a disingenuous observation done for effect rather than substance. If what anyone believes cannot be stated on this forum, just because it doesn't 'go with the flow,' then it is not an open forum. And it appears to me that you don't want an open forum.

Regardless of whether you try to label what I have posted as reactionary, elitist, a minority position, an intellectual straightjacket, a dogma-induced haze, as others in the so-called over-whelming majority on this thread, will not make a supportable opinion any less valid.

 

[Urban Shocker]

The values we each ascribe to buildings discussed on this forum - what they represent - depends on the perspective that we each bring to the discussion. Clearly we're a disparate bunch, with wide-ranging perspectives.

Regarding the visceral appreciation of 1 St. Thomas, you can't draw more out of anything than what was creatively put into it in the first place. There's an "exact" copy of the Parthenon in Nashville, but the real deal is in Athens and there's a reason - authenticity, beauty, visceral appeal - that people take more enjoyment from the one than from the other.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that because fauxmongers are the bottom of the barrel, creatively speaking, they generally don't even understand the visual language of the styles they ape. A set of skimpy Ionic pilasters here, a grossly out of scale frieze above, pseudo-Georgian windows, Victorian gingerbread dormer windows above ... all in one building! I saw one such Grand Guignol mishmash - spanking new, with a model suite - this morning on Parliament Street, just north of Winchester. As indicated earlier, Mies attracted a similar claque of imitators; tribute bands are spawned daily. Excellence of design based on authenticity to the time we're living in is the only sensible way to go, since that is what survives and speaks well of us to future generations.

 

[Zephyr]

Well stated.

The critical eye will weigh down equally on all styles, and be fair if properly utilised. The inherent difficulty in this approach is that one must step back and evaluate, not just react to a building. Sometimes when we come face to face with our initial reaction versus studied evaluation, we can still be in sync, but it can also go in reverse, all part of the process. It is the same process we learn with art, some will just depend on their first reaction and never change for the rest of their life. Others will discover and/or learn that the approach must be beyond the initial reaction to be of any real value. That latter is a byproduct of maturation, in my opinion.

I think that we have already established that preservation of good architecture, or at the very least, preservation of historically valued buildings, is a good foundation from which to vary the urban palette. Retrofitting the lost styles is far more trecherous. Ideally, we should not be in the business of force feeding a historicist style by inserting buildings that look like they belong to the past, and proclaiming that our work is done - that's nostalgia, and nostalgia seldom if ever results in a good architecture. One of the more intriguing dimensions to so-called Modernist architecture is that much of it strives to be ahistorical, stripping down to content, not decoration, the latter of which can be typed and dated in a hurry. But the result is not automatically OK because we may prefer it - that too must be evaluated.

Contextualism is often given as the reason for creating some of these historicist buildings, and it can end up in denigrating not only the work created, but also what it is meant to enhance. Aggressive, anti-contextual buildings, are an extreme from the opposite direction - sometimes it still works, often it does not.

I suppose that some will think that a step back means you lose by definition some of your passion toward the very thing that you are experiencing. On the contrary, it intensifies that passion, but at the same time it puts that passion in alignment with our brain. You often see other layers to the architectural statement, or the lack thereof. You can sometimes determine when something is following rote or is truly an inspired work. Ultimately this approach will lead to a subjective conclusion, and I will never try to portray it otherwise. But it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the value of going through with what one person here disdainfully refers to as the 'intellectual exercise'.

Architects are likely to create their work with both passion and brains, why don't we return the favour with our passion and brains, and not just one or the other.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Regardless of whether you try to label what I have posted as reactionary, elitist, a minority position, an intellectual straightjacket, a dogma-induced haze, as others in the so-called over-whelming majority on this thread, will not make a supportable opinion any less valid.

As far as I'm concerned, you've already applied perfect labels to everyone: "I think I can come to this forum with an informed perspective, not just a collection of groundless opinions."

 

[Tewder]

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...

I could't agree more. Excellent post.

 

[adma]

Regarding the visceral appreciation of 1 St. Thomas, you can't draw more out of anything than what was creatively put into it in the first place. There's an "exact" copy of the Parthenon in Nashville, but the real deal is in Athens and there's a reason - authenticity, beauty, visceral appeal - that people take more enjoyment from the one than from the other.

Yet one wouldn't blithely *discard* the Nashville Parthenon because it's not the "real deal"...