If someone can give me a defence of the vandalized, third rate, grubby crap that cheapens and lessens what is a glorious, wonderful addition to the AGO, I'd like to hear it rather than an empty retort. It's this defence of the mediocre that is truly maddening, and why this city will always take one step forward, one back in terms of improving its public realm. Tell me, then, how a context worthy of the building in terms of creating an open piazza (or *something*) of some sort at the expense of unremarkable, neglected and shabby buildings is a *bad* thing. Where does this neurotic, almost pathological fetishization of the cheap and third rate come from? Why is *any* attempt to match the efforts made to create a striking building with a similarly striking, high-quality streetscape sabotaged by the desire to ensure that the most unremarkable elements must somehow be equated with the most remarkable? What, honestly, is the loss to the area with these businesses gone in comparison to something, *anything* being done to showcase Gehry's building as it should, and not hide it amongst clutter and properties that aren't even being maintained by the people owning them now? How much *better* would the area be, if, say a square designed by Gehry had been planned across from it? How much more coherent, more unapologetically *grand* (now there's a term we shy away from these days) would the building be? And before anyone says Toronto Life Square, that isn't the case of expropriation being wrong per se, but more so the execution of what came later. Does anyone, really, *want* what was there before at Yonge and Dundas? And if not, why the defence of what's at Dundas and Beverley now? Because as it stands now, looking at this photo, my only reaction is, man, nice new building, but look at the crap around it. Why didn't they do something about that? I imagine many people will say the same thing, and that's a shame.
So, why, exactly, am I wrong for wanting better than settling for third-rate, for the half-assed?
