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Public space finally gets support
Oct 29, 2007 04:30 AM
Christopher Hume
Come January, there will be two Royal Ontario Museums, one above ground, one below.
The Museum subway station is in the middle of a $5 million remake that will see its 48 columns transformed into copies of objects from the ROM's fabled collection. And for good measure, there will also be pieces from the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art just across Queen's Park.
The project, sponsored by the Toronto Community Foundation, grew out of Mayor David Miller's City Beautiful initiative. Though most of us had forgotten about the program, the foundation took it to heart.
The idea is that although subway stations form an important part of the public realm, they are generally overlooked, even ignored. Given that, and the energy unleashed by Toronto's cultural rebuilding program, the intention was to capture some of that spirit and take it below street level.
"There is a recognition that public spaces were in decline throughout the city," explains foundation president Rahul Bhardwaj. "Subway stations in particular were in steep decline. We wanted to change that. The big question was where do you start. We went to the province and the city, then to our donor base. We quickly discovered this was a concept people could get their heads around."
After that, architect Gary McCluskie, principal at Diamond + Schmitt Architects, got involved. His first task was to sit down with curators from the ROM and the Gardiner to choose artifacts that were appropriate to a subterranean setting.
"We realized we needed to find things that originally were load bearing," McCluskie says. "They had the heft and the size we needed. We came up with five objects and they will be installed in a repeating pattern along the 48 columns in Museum station."
These objects include a late 19th-century house post made by the Oweekeno people in Rivers Inlet, B.C., a stone carving of the ancient Egyptian god of death and fertility, Osiris, as well as a Toltec warrior from Central America.
The copies were made in Oakville by Design Plaster Mouldings using a vandal- and graffiti-proof concrete reinforced with glass. When completed, they will be wrapped around the pillars that extend along the length of station at track level. The upper storey is not a part of the project.
As McCluskie also points out, plans call for two more stations on the University line – St. Patrick (Dundas) and Osgoode (Queen) – to be redesigned. Though money must still be raised, the intention is to redo the facilities in ways that reflects the cultural institutions above, namely the Ontario College of Art & Design and the Art Gallery of Ontario at St. Patrick, and the Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet Company at Osgoode.
McCluskie imagines the Dundas stop might become a gallery with changing exhibitions programmed by OCAD and the AGO. At Queen, classical music would be broadcast and the station turned into a giant screen for operatic and balletic images.
As the city struggles to reclaim its public realm, the rebirth of these long neglected but impressive stations couldn't come at a better time. These, after all, are places used daily by thousands of people. As a result, they will have an impact that is both practical and symbolic.
Despite its culture of civic impoverishment, Toronto is actually the richest city in Canada, one of the richest in the world. It's time some of that wealth is redirected to spaces shared by the community, the public, not private, realm that defines who we are.
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Thanks to Hume for pointing out that Osgoode will be turned into a "giant screen". Somehow all the renderings of the station didn't convey that idea to me.
