Belatedly
* The Redpath sign that remains on the side of the building is their cursive script logo, based on the signature of John Redpath who founded the company in 1854. It is one of the oldest continuously used Canadian logos, and it is not "style snobbery" to point out that, by comparison, the block lettered and poorly spaced sign that was removed is of no such significance. People can go dumpster-diving and scrap yard trawling for old industrial detritus until the cows come home, but that won't make the bits of twisted metal they find automatically "significant".
When seen from the north west, especially at night, the new TATE & LYLE and the old cursive Redpath signs work well together, typographically. The new sign is large enough to read as the main element, but the older sign is in proportion to it. Visually, they form a unit. Thought has gone into the placement of the new sign to create this effect, which is purely a design exercise.
Yet Babel, under the particular circumstances we're dealing with, you're still being a miserable prick of a typographic prig. To present that argument to a Docomomo-ish Toronto crowd (and not just Martins-Manteiga acolytes) would be like arguing to a room full of rock critics that the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" is insignificant because it's musically derivative, sloppy and amateurish.
Besides--as alluded to in this thread--maybe it's not the micro-issue of sentimentalizing the lettering, but the macro-issue of whether Redpath at large merits preservationist sentimentalizing? And this is more a matter of how one interprets, or spins, the spirit of the age--that is, the 50s modernist ethos as being no-nonsense, virile, and heroically *anti*-sentimental. Especially straightforward industrial operations like this; allow it to look good and exemplary and up-to-the-moment, but once its time comes, its time comes. Something to be accepted, rather than protested against. (That particular ethos might be why original patrons like Issy Sharp and Sonja Bata are able to relatively painlessly "let go" of their masterworks, however much it may distress today's modernist-preservation-minded.)
Indeed, I often sense, in the posts of Babel etc, a perhaps constructive-minded nostalgia for that era, before notions of quality and refinement became corroded by excessive pluralism, sentimentality, fixations upon imperfect ephemera et al., the kind of stuff which led to PoMo delusions, etc. Let's say, going back to an era when it was perfectly obvious that opera was quality and "Psychotic Reaction" was juvenile garbage,
esp. if it meant an ideal we were to aspire to.
It may be a well-meaning merit-acknowledgment gesture to list the Redpath plant, but as with so many historical listings, such bestowal of status opens up a whole can of Morrisian anti-scrape worms--whether it's with the sign removal or with the uncertain future of the plant at large. But let's get real--to the unwashed masses, what's "aesthetic" about the plant starts and ends (unfortunately) with the whale mural. And to those who run the place, it's functional before it's "functionalistic". (In that light, maybe Terminal 2 was the truest Bauhaus-spirit architectural product--visually clean, simple, did its duty and thank you, goodbye, no sentimentality necessary. Indeed, as such it may paradoxically have been "truer" than the self-consciously monumental "Parkin masterpiece" Terminal 1.)
So--sorry. Though I find that this kind of "insane" ephemera-fixation seems particularly characteristic of Gen-Xers onward--heck, Douglas Coupland himself has embodied or even codified the type in his various publications. (Maybe if you were born before 1960, or or at least *wish* you were, you woudn't understand. Just something in the overall cultural air changed.)
Anyway, when it comes to typography and signage,
I'm perfectly happy to worship at the altar of Venus. Oh, and
once again speaking of Spacing fixations...
