Urban Shocker
Doyenne
TKTKTK: I'll be at Simon Boccanegra on the evening of Apil 11th. If you want spectacle with your fries, press your nose to the glass of the City Room and I'll give you a little wave.
TKTKTK: I'll be at Simon Boccanegra on the evening of Apil 11th. If you want spectacle with your fries, press your nose to the glass of the City Room and I'll give you a little wave.
No I'm not. I'm poking fun at how overblown you're trying to make this. "Explain dated"? Explain "that still doesn't explain the word dated". What part are you unsure about? Here let me help
But that's still not helping.
Look, I brought up Tom Wolfe for a reason.
Back when it was a cheeky and subversive gesture to compare such stuff to car showrooms and fast-food outlets
Against what seemed to be the Dawning Age of Post-Modernism...yes, such a fundamentally spartan aesthetic might have seemed "dated". And I can see what you mean if it were a matter of judging something of the time like the Kinoshita ROM additions.
What he's saying is that your attitudes are dated - to about thirty years ago. Big Hair is soooo yesterday.
Jaguar happens to be the current sponsor; if it was Aeroplan you'd say the place looks like a hangar; if it was Hugo Boss you'd say it looks like a clothing store; if it was BMO you'd say it looks like a bank; if it was Blakes you'd say it looks like a law office, etc.
In fact, it looks like a great opera house ... for a company that's celebrating their 60th anniversary ( a Diamond anniversary, no less! ), has performed at 99% capacity for the past three years since it opened, with an annual subscription rate of 75% - far higher than the 44% average for North American opera houses, and puts on the third largest number of performances per season of any opera company on the continent.
No wonder other cities are lining up to hire the It Boy who designed it.
Nobody I've ever spoken to at the opera has ever said they're embarrassed by Jaguar's sponsorship. Only you do, and you don't even go there;
given the epic, Wagnerian nature of the recurring Jaguar lietmotif in your hysterically operatic performances I'm starting to question your sanity.
It's possible that this all comes down to age difference. In the same way you guys see the Schermerhorn as pastiche and from another time (from your childhoods no doubt), I see the 4SC
Yes, that's exactly the Tom Wolfe reactionary-amateur contrarianism working. (Besides, I personally don't see Schermerhorn so much as "pastiche and from another time", as "entropy".)
But please, don't present this as a generation gap.
It's not age difference, it's cultural difference. It's that you're just another Sunday Painter judge of architecture who posts on message boards. And Sunday Painter judgment knows no age: it isn't like somebody half of Urban Shocker's age would be automatically more likely to take the Schermerhorn-over-4SC timeless-vs-dated POV. Indeed, a fair number of those who would take such a POV happen to be his age, or even older (as in: letters-to-the-editor/blog-commenter crabs who rant about concrete highrises from the 60s being designated historical and wish more new buildings looked like Robert Stern).
But please, don't present this as a generation gap. It's not age difference, it's cultural difference. It's that you're just another Sunday Painter judge of architecture who posts on message boards. And Sunday Painter judgment knows no age: it isn't like somebody half of Urban Shocker's age would be automatically more likely to take the Schermerhorn-over-4SC timeless-vs-dated POV. Indeed, a fair number of those who would take such a POV happen to be his age, or even older (as in: letters-to-the-editor/blog-commenter crabs who rant about concrete highrises from the 60s being designated historical and wish more new buildings looked like Robert Stern).
Though, yes, somewhere in the middle...just generally, I wouldn't say that, programming aside, the 4SC inspires a whole lot of ultra-enthusiasm among youngsters looking for a little zip and zowie. As US indicates, it isn't Big Hair enough. Or Big Silicone Breast enough, or Collagen enough, or Bald Pubes enough. And while that's a shallow way of putting it (or not), it helps explain a lot of the criticism that has come the 4SC's way; like, the place is just too "aesthetically subtle" by half. Relative to the attributes I list above, it's too, er, "flat-chested". It's like a Society Lady with A-cups.
But, "dated"? Yeah, like said Society Lady needs silicones.
I, too, have problems with US's sometimes hagiographic defences. But really, if you're going to label this (and by extension, all of Jack Diamond's oeuvre) as holus bolus "dated", you need a lot, lot more flesh in your argument than pat comparisons to car showrooms...
- I like the expression, "joyful chaos of healthy urbanism", suggesting as it does an embracing of the whole. My Toronto is large enough to have the 4SC and the big hair ROM, and the graceful and shy Gardiner, and even the just-pretty-much-OK things like Sixty Loft or most of Quadrangle's buildings. None of this cringing that so many seem to go in for, for me. Even when I strongly dislike a building, such as 1 St. Thomas, it pleases me to know that it brings pleasure to others.
But "dated"? - the argument simply isn't there. There are grades between A+ and F, and the 4SC, as with almost every building everywhere, is somewhere in the muddied middle.