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LAST EXIT TO BEAVER
Mysterious Pompeii or misunderstood Rochester -- everyone has a favourite ruin. For journalist Alfred Holden, it's Beaver, a city noted for its advanced culture and design. Some say math was invented there. Others say it was drywall. It's hard to be certain because until recently, Beaver was believed to be lost.
The fact that Beaver is the work of teenagers from over 30 years ago and is made of cardboard and Pringles cans shouldn't dilute the awe inspired by its debut this week at the Design Exchange. With over a thousand buildings contained within 16 square meters, Beaver began as a summer project among Holden and his cousins at the ages of nine. Frustrated with the misleading claims of Lego, the troupe began using cereal boxes, magic markers and anything else they could scrounge, ultimately turning a two-month project into a six-year narrative epic that included characters, elections and a certain dry wit. As in life, "DeCline Stocks" is just down the way from the "Gateway Funeral Home."
"It's very vernacular," Holden drolly cautions when I catch him in between last minute repairs. With the pieces stowed away in Holden's family attic, it was fellow journalist and urban enthusiast Conan Tobias who convinced Holden of the possibility of rebuilding the city after the two attended a Douglas Coupland exhibition of childhood modelling sets. Tobias remembers telling Holden, "Your models are much better."
Returning to Beaver, Holden was struck in hindsight that "the urban landscape, in all its layers, comes across. There are Italianate buildings. You've also got Mies and Le Corbusier. And we weren't studying this! So it's an interesting reading of those movements through the subconsciousness of the young."
Such an intense love for cities might have been particular to that group of adolescents with the experience of Beaver carrying through to their adult lives. Holden himself has written about cities and architecture for years and his co-builders have all gone into civic- and design-minded careers. Of the buildings themselves, there's undeniable charm but, as Holden points out, lessons as well. "Density is exiting. [Beaver is] compact, tall, diverse, and," he laughs, "kind of weird." Accidental and detailed at the same time, Beaver is a just-shabby-enough model for the kind of planning Toronto needs. "Beautiful drawings seduce us," Holden says, citing the recent waterfront pitch of a maple-leaf-shaped boardwalk as an example of how large-scale design usually goes wrong. "And when it's built, all the wonderful geometric shapes and intersections, the art of it, just isn't apparent when you're standing in it."
Unlike Daniel Libeskind's oppressive whimsy (to cite another example), Beaver's whimsy is free and ersatz, closer to the way cities actually function. Unfortunately, as it is only a few feet tall, not many can live there, but it sure is a nice place to visit. BRIAN JOSEPH DAVIS
BEAVER IS ON DISPLAY JUNE 21-JULY 9, WITH ALFRED HOLDEN IN ATTENDANCE JUNE 24. FREE. THE DESIGN EXCHANGE, 234 BAY. 416-363-6121.
