Urban Scrawl
Toronto
Beauty is in eye of the demolisher
John Moore
National Post
24 May 2006
Yet another of Toronto's architectural landmarks is being torn down.
"Good Riddance!" wrote the National Post of the demolition of the Inn on the Park, as if the building's continued existence was some kind of ongoing insult to the city.
"It was crap," one person wrote inelegantly on a local discussion board. Another observed that the modernist complex and its dwindling number of Toronto siblings were "evil buildings that did tremendous damage to the community.''
The general tone of those who supported the Inn's demolition -- still not quite done, by the way -- was not only that the building had outlived its usefulness but that it had always been ugly and its fans were either elitists or deluded enemies of progress.
From where does this curious mixture of sublimated anger and glee spring? The Inn's detractors got their million pounds of dust, and yet there seems to be this petulant post-demolition need to kick the building while it's down and to deliver one final poke in the eye to its defeated fans.
Architecture is an art form and as such it will always trigger the kind of rancorous public debate that roils around prominent works. The difference for architecture is that no one has to live inside the Elephant Dung Mary painting, nor is the average Torontonian compelled to listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring every single day while navigating the Don Valley Parkway.
Defending art is always going to be a loser's game. Since artistic merit is highly subjective, the debate inevitably deteriorates into a "snob vs. mob" argument in which each side is easily dismissed by the other.
One can spend paragraphs explaining the philosophy of modernism, its cool denunciation of cautious traditionalism, the lean unadorned elegance of buildings that stand as sculptures, the eye-pleasing austerity of a structure like the Inn on the Park. But what chance does an architectural egghead have against someone who responds that modernism is ugly, no one likes it and by the way who gives a crap anyway?
In the art world, those who despise a given work or movement will try, but rarely succeed, to suppress it. It is in the world of architecture that the mob gets its revenge, which explains the triumphalism in the wake of the Inn on the Park's ongoing demise.
At one time or another, just about every building and neighbourhood Toronto now treasures has been threatened with demolition. Today it would be unthinkable to flatten Old City Hall, Cabbagetown or the Gooderham and Worts complex. They survived long enough to transcend old to historic and then retro chic.
Modernism may not be so lucky. The movement captured the poppy futurism of the 1960s. Sadly, few things age worse in the short term than the past's vision of the future. By the time Modernism is chic again there won't be much left of it.
Not every building can or deserves to be saved. But who can name a preservation project that has come to be thought of as a mistake? Conversely, most people agree we are much the poorer for the demolition of New York's Penn Station and a third of Frank Lloyd Wright's catalogue.
Upon the demise of the mighty Penn Station, architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, "Any city gets what it admires and will pay for and ultimately deserves. In the future, we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but the monuments we destroy."
- John Moore is host of The John Moore Show on NewsTalk 1010 CFRB from 3 to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday.
