Adma is on vacation for a few days because of the wording at the end of his post above. The ad hominem attacks need to end, to be replaced with civil discussion. What is this? The House of Commons?
42
42
Toronto Forma | 308m | 84s | Great Gulf | Gehry Partners
- Thread starter golodhendil
- Start date
buildup
Senior Member
Adma,
I am trying to say is that this block simply doesn't inspire me in any way as it currently is. I would hate to see a similar proposal for any part of Queen or King West of Spadina for example. I even have a hard time visualizing the block after passing through. And my standardsvof beauty aren't that high - case in point there are parts of Weston Road North of Eglinton that i love for some odd reason!
I am trying to say is that this block simply doesn't inspire me in any way as it currently is. I would hate to see a similar proposal for any part of Queen or King West of Spadina for example. I even have a hard time visualizing the block after passing through. And my standardsvof beauty aren't that high - case in point there are parts of Weston Road North of Eglinton that i love for some odd reason!
adma
Superstar
Except that it isn't just about "subjective feeling"--it's about the bigger context of what heritage has come to mean, encompass, etc in this day and age. Plus all the other little tripwires of the various elements already having been officially recognized as "heritage" (some, like Eclipse Whitewear, as far back as the 70s!), or of its already having rather singularly served as a de facto if not always de jure "historic district" on behalf of Mirvish publicity for several decades now, or, well, the sheer size, scale, and, yes, age (i.e. pre-modern--when it comes to "popular perceptions thereof", that usually helps) of the buildings. Whether it "inspires you" is Sunday-painter meaningless--in this context, their simple existence in 2012/13 as "what they are" is sufficient to override such overinsistent value judgment.
So, it isn't about whether it inspires you, or inspires me--personally, I'd rather take a strategically agnostic standpoint, perhaps because I know there's a plethora of seemingly sad-sack Weston/Eglintons out there to potentially "inspire" me. It's about this being a big whack of building fabric dotted with various forms of heritage and/or "cultural institution" status. And as such--that's where the controversy lies.
Gehry or no Gehry--though certainly, the "Gehry as bait" (or to quote National Lampoon, "Buy this Gehry or we kill this dog") factor looms high.
Queen/King W of Spadina--well, duh, esp. given the comparative clash of scale--though let's assume that a Gehry/Mirvish scheme proposed there would be "scaled down to context" from what's proposed for this present site. But even then, if such a scheme threatened a significant stretch of something that wasn't either a vacant lot or post-WWII "taxpayer"--expect controversy.
Look: this isn't about fear of the avant-garde or "monstrous carbuncles". And the issues of height, scale, infrastructure overload etc are red-herring abstractions that don't register with most. OTOH existing "heritage" building fabric is *not* an abstraction: it's palpable reality. And in this case, it's the tripwire par excellence.
Look at it this way: it's a near-certainty that the Mirvish block will be in this year's Heritage Canada Top Ten Endangered Places List. (And it'd not be the first "death by starchitecture" case in such a list--remember Bata?)
buildup
Senior Member
As usual your sentences are very showy, but good communicators don't disguise weak arguments behind abstraction. Is the word 'sophistry'? I am sure you will explain. This block is nothing special. Gehry has potential. You know it, I know it. Since you're agnostic anyway, why so insistent?
Ramako
Moderator
Brevity is indeed the soul of wit.
Danny Crispin
Banned
What on Earth are you talking about? With all due respect, would it kill you to write like a regular person? I get indigestion when I read these ostentatiously verbose posts. Whatever you're trying to say would be much better understood with more simple language.
Peepers
Banned
agoraflaneur
Active Member
In all fairness, Adma adds a sophistication to these boards that cannot be confined to the simplicity of a few sentences. His references are always intriguing, precisely due to the fact that I don't know many of them. That is how one learns and expands one's horizons. Rarified sentences are not for everyone, but sometimes a point made a la Rob Ford sounds better than when it is actually fleshed out, masking its true meaning. There are two sides to this argument.
Nonetheless, the point does seem to be simple, and easily understood: this is a whole block of pre-war architecture. It will be destroyed. While all too often something bland and mediocre does replace the old, in this case there will be something that many perceive to be "starchitect" worthy. To adma, that simply isn't enough to justify the loss of an entire block of heritage - in fact, almost all that is left on King West.
While I actually don't agree this time - I do think that the end can justify the means in this case, as this is one of the only truly iconic projects I have seen for Toronto - his point is readily understandable, and in my view made much more meaningful by the addition of many unique insights and judgements. These are the fabric of thought.
Nonetheless, the point does seem to be simple, and easily understood: this is a whole block of pre-war architecture. It will be destroyed. While all too often something bland and mediocre does replace the old, in this case there will be something that many perceive to be "starchitect" worthy. To adma, that simply isn't enough to justify the loss of an entire block of heritage - in fact, almost all that is left on King West.
While I actually don't agree this time - I do think that the end can justify the means in this case, as this is one of the only truly iconic projects I have seen for Toronto - his point is readily understandable, and in my view made much more meaningful by the addition of many unique insights and judgements. These are the fabric of thought.
adma
Superstar
Look at it this way, re your point about things being "uninspiring": with my, uh, "informed eye" (shouldn't we all have one?), I'd find a calculatedly meandering 5-hour slog to Niagara Falls or NOTL through all sorts of intermixed flotsam both poetic and dreary-sprawly to be, actually, more inspiring than a 1 1/2 hour quickie via the QEW to let the ooh! aah! Falls or NOTL inspire by themselves in coffee-table isolation. And I don't feel I even have to explain why; it should be self-evident (and my "agnosticism" is in my acceptance of the flotsamness of the flotsam).
And if you feel otherwise, or that being on such a drawn-out journey would be intolerable tedium...well, don't go on road trips with me.
Tewder
Senior Member
I don't know, I think Adma described it fairly succinctly:
Where is the confusion? To dismiss the listed heritage status of the block in question because one doesn't 'like' it or 'get' it is sort of petulant (ditto the cultural and established urban fabric status)... and what does it say about us and our collective values that we become so willfully ignorant when the right carrot is dangled?
I get that people here want these Gehry monuments, but I don't get why they couldn't be an addition or layer to what already so successfully exists?
Where is the confusion? To dismiss the listed heritage status of the block in question because one doesn't 'like' it or 'get' it is sort of petulant (ditto the cultural and established urban fabric status)... and what does it say about us and our collective values that we become so willfully ignorant when the right carrot is dangled?
I get that people here want these Gehry monuments, but I don't get why they couldn't be an addition or layer to what already so successfully exists?
buildup
Senior Member
And yet your own analogy required a destination - The Falls or NOTL. I like the flotsam too, but I like a destination as well be it Gehry Towers, Mirvish Galleries or dinner at Edulis.
No worries there is no shortgage of flotsam in Toronto.
adma
Superstar
Or rather, I see the context in which the loss can be very readily deemed "unjustifiable".
But to reiterate a point of mine, that there's a difference btw/those of us who arrived at realms like UT w/a "new construction" bias (skyscraper/development geeks et al) vs an "existing conditions" bias (heritage buffs and Jane Jacobites et al)--and by nature, I find that the latter has a broader, more catholic scope of, well, preexisting "urban inspiration". They view what exists as a place of scaleable urban history and urban stories, even when apparently banal or unkempt. But especially in this day and age, it's a treacherous slope--one that can easily collapse into indiscriminate, overprotective overembrace (and I've seen that frequently on UT and elsewhere, treating middling losses like they were Penn Station-scale catastrophes)--OTOH, it can turn that treachery on its head by (as I'm presently attempting re Mirvish/Gehry) comprehending the overall present-day context against which this is all operating (including that of other heritage cases), in more immediate, less abstract terms than an "Ed Glaeser" type ever could. Thus while we, from the "preexisting conditions" realm, might not be "anti-Gehry" or even "anti-starchitect" per se, we're also less dependent upon Gehry or starchitecture as an "inspiration crutch"--thus our natural skepticism t/w placing all our eggs into that one basket. We can understand (if not necessarily endorse) the case for Gehry; we can't understand those who'd deem the block expendable for anyone less than a Gehry.
However, to illuminate the treacherousness of what "embraceable heritage vs starchitecture" has come to mean in 2013, let me offer this image
This, in the foreground, is what was torn down for the TD Centre's Royal Trust Tower in the 1960s (and the former Rossin House in the back went a few years later; being on a non-TD parcel, it remained vacant/parking until Standard Life was built in the early 80s). Back then, if anyone wanted to talk about heritage losses on behalf of TD, it was about Carrere & Hastings' Bank of Toronto--stuff like this was deemed unimportant, minor, of trivial importance (a little less so for Rossin House; but then, that had by then been compromised by a Moderne facade-stripping). And this was when Eric Arthur had already turned the "No Mean City" tide--yet this was lost in the shuffle. Nobody sought to "identify", "research", etc, because that would've gone radically against the tide of everything then. In the mid-late 60s, it wasn't "valued" except, maybe, by the extreme-edge Sewellian rabble-rousers who hadn't found their "voice" yet. Yet today--present an image like that in many a Toronto-based forum, and you'll get people moaning about how Toronto didn't respect its heritage, tore everything down in the 60s and 70s, etc. That's where we've come to nowadays. And while you won't find many thoughtful people denying TD's own heritage status--if the "prevailing conditions" in that photo still held today, you can be darned certain it'd be a heritage issue, "no offense to Mies, but," etc. And anyone denying that it was of any heritage value (which is, as we know, a somewhat separate issue from what might be the proposed replacement) would be met with dirty looks "in the field".
And what I've just described illuminates, from virtually every conceivable angle, pro or con, "knowing one's context".
Last edited:
adma
Superstar
Maybe my point being, think of "Toronto" as the destination, rather than Gehry/Mirvish/Edulis--or maybe as something with enough default "destinationism" in its midst that it doesn't absolutely require such singular crutches. (And by extension, the Falls/NOTL become framed more as "end points" than as singular "destinations", i.e. part of a diverse archipelago of destinations.)
Oh, and as an indicator of my not being necessarily anti-Gehry/Mirvish, I've indicated elsewhere in this thread that I wouldn't be surprised if, in case the present site proved non-viable, such a scheme migrated to the Honest Ed's site instead--and likely without the same kind of heritage opposition, even though there may be an architectural/cultural heritage argument on behalf of the existing store (though more so had it not undergone its ultimate wraparound-signage expansion in the 80s). Of course, on *that* site, it wouldn't likely involve 80-storey condominium towers, so no fear of backlash there...
rpeters
Active Member
sorry adma but I think we're all tired of you maybe having a point, and possibly having an opinion. This isn't your own personal blog.
gristle
Senior Member
You should be sorry. Who is the "we" you are speaking on behalf of? And by the way, it's a forum, not a blog. There are exchanges going on. Don't let your desire to censor blind you from that.