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No, dear, we can't. But we can agree that adma and Archivist may have failed to pick up on the gay graphic designers' humour that permeates the bitchfest between TKTKTK and myself - which TKTKTK has remarked upon several times. And I think we can agree that some of us have little regard for the design-free zone created by "embracing the whole" - that gruesome level playing field between all buildings and public spaces regardless of how well designed or how poorly designed they are. I suspect that TKTKTK and I may have some common ground on that issue. And if someone admits they don't see the world through the filter of aesthetics why would anyone expect them to see either the beau or the laide in anything? The idea that there's something "unfortunate" about the Four Seasons Centre being surrounded by streets on all four sides suggests a similar line of reasoning. It's a building where all sides address the different functional needs of the building in straightforward and unheirarchical ways. It Boy Diamond's response to the FSC site, and It Boy Clewes's response to the the west side of 20 Niagara don't represent a view of design that is absolutist either, just one that accepts these differences.
 
TKTKTK said:
I keep wanting to back-peddle from dated, but everytime I try to rephrase it, I end up in the same place. It's a circa 2002 car dealership. Glass box in the front, cars around, emphasis on the brands, underemphasis on the building.

I will concede that I love cars soooo much more than the rest of you, so maybe the connection is obvious to me in a way that you're not as familiar with.
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First of all (and to momentarily back-pedal from the 4SC), explain how a circa 2002 car dealership differs significantly from a circa 2008 car dealership in "datedness".

Second, explain how, exactly, all those examples you illustrated are fatally either banal or bad or bland or "dated", architecturally speaking. Because to me, they're not necessarily all that bad, with several of them seeming like top-notch high-style, uh, "commercial vernacular", the cream of their particular crop, and as valid now as they might have been in 2002. Methinks you're overstating the "underemphasis on the building"--and methinks you're also using the 2002 date to create a false sense of "datedness": about the most dated/banalish thing of the bunch I can sense is the Hyundai showroom, which also happens to be the most recognizably "Ontarian" (harrumph harrumph), the most polluted by accretions (phone number and signage within) and the least stylistically comparable to the 4SC.

If this is anything to go by...what's so bad about drawing inspiration from or parallels to a car dealership? Cars on display; 4SC event attendees on display. In either case, it can be quite joyful and magical and inspirational (especially all lit up in the evening). As dealerships go, these places can make *us* love cars as much as you do. So? But you seem to be presenting them as places where there's no architectural thought at all except to place cars on display. Every single one of them. Uh...

Don't forget that the realm of car dealerships and cars themselves were capable of inspiring the modern masters, along with garages, grain silos, daylight factories, and other exemplars of the "utilitarian" and "functional". So, maybe it continues to this day. Is that bad? And must a car dealership be loaded with Gothicky detail a la Burano's soon-to-be-resurrected Addison On Bay in order to be "architecturally valid"?

What you've displayed here is, for the most part, hardly at all the architectural equivalent of a WalMart pantsuit. Maybe Joe Fresh at worst--if even that. It isn't simply "bland" or "obviously ordinary" except to Sunday painter amateurish judges like you who think a glass box is a glass box is a glass box...
 
adma said:
First of all (and to momentarily back-pedal from the 4SC), explain how a circa 2002 car dealership differs significantly from a circa 2008 car dealership in "datedness".

Second, explain how, exactly, all those examples you illustrated are fatally either banal or bad or bland or "dated", architecturally speaking. Because to me, they're not necessarily all that bad, with several of them seeming like top-notch high-style, uh, "commercial vernacular", the cream of their particular crop, and as valid now as they might have been in 2002. Methinks you're overstating the "underemphasis on the building"--and methinks you're also using the 2002 date to create a false sense of "datedness": about the most dated/banalish thing of the bunch I can sense is the Hyundai showroom, which also happens to be the most recognizably "Ontarian" (harrumph harrumph), the most polluted by accretions (phone number and signage within) and the least stylistically comparable to the 4SC.

If this is anything to go by...what's so bad about drawing inspiration from or parallels to a car dealership? Cars on display; 4SC event attendees on display. In either case, it can be quite joyful and magical and inspirational (especially all lit up in the evening). As dealerships go, these places can make *us* love cars as much as you do. So? But you seem to be presenting them as places where there's no architectural thought at all except to place cars on display. Every single one of them. Uh...

Don't forget that the realm of car dealerships and cars themselves were capable of inspiring the modern masters, along with garages, grain silos, daylight factories, and other exemplars of the "utilitarian" and "functional". So, maybe it continues to this day. Is that bad? And must a car dealership be loaded with Gothicky detail a la Burano's soon-to-be-resurrected Addison On Bay in order to be "architecturally valid"?

What you've displayed here is, for the most part, hardly at all the architectural equivalent of a WalMart pantsuit. Maybe Joe Fresh at worst--if even that. It isn't simply "bland" or "obviously ordinary" except to Sunday painter amateurish judges like you who think a glass box is a glass box is a glass box...
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rottentomatoes_big.jpg
 
I suppose that's in reference to your previous statement...

Two fuddy-duddies (an ageless quality) arguing for something so obviously ordinary isn't flustering me. It's the same line of argument you hear from your parents about whatever music you like, and the defense of whatever music they like (it's not dated!). If anything, it's comforting.
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Except that your generation-gap-esque metaphor is shallow and fallacious. In fact, if we take another icon of the so-called "obviously ordinary" that you and I have run into crosshairs over--the stations on the Bloor-Danforth subway line--the crusade on its behalf has been led by the young. It was not the Statler and Waldorfs of our society who created and are wearing the Spacing buttons. They'd probably regard those who dismiss that so-called "utilitarian" and "obviously ordinary" aesthetic as the truer fuddy-duddies--indeed, it's a realm that would probably identify more with my thinking-outside-the-box take on car showrooms.

Ditto with those arguing on behalf of Don Mills-type 50s suburban contemporary--they're not old. They're young.

Though yeah--on second thought, you present fuddy-duddyism as "an ageless quality", in which case the Spacing/uTOpia crowd might as well be young farts to you. And in which case one might as well also counter-argue that as the original owners kick off, it's indeed "the young" (and maybe in certain cases, the offspring of the original owners) that are doing away with "dated" and "so obviously ordinary" Don Mills bungalows on behalf of McMansions.

Sometimes, you see, the kids reacting to the fuddy-duddy values of their parents are...how shall we put it? Idiots.
 
adma said:
I suppose that's in reference to your previous statement...
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You give me both too much and not enough credit sometimes :)

I think this has turned a bit into Starship Troopers. Most of the cast is in on Verhoeven's joke, but not Casper Van Dien; he's at his earnest best, and keeps missing everyone else's wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Except that your generation-gap-esque metaphor is shallow and fallacious.
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More than that even, it was...a joke :)


In truth, I thought of Statler and Waldorf more as US and I.
 
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Nope, that was AP and I. I don't know what we are.

Adore your Klaus Nomi-esque new avatar by the way!

As for the generational thing, can anyone born and raised in the '50s and '60s, and growing up with sensible Modernism, take all that seriously the excesses of either visually loud starchitect spectacle or historicist Cheddingtonista pastiche? There seems to be a continuum of absurdity where they meet up on the far horizon and merge together. To a gay man of my generation the former is a bit like the little twink at a party who won't shut up when you're trying to talk to someone interesting, and the latter is like the piss-elegant old closet queens we encountered in the 'gay lib' '70s when everyone else was coming out of the closet.

adma's point about the adaptability of Modernist buildings is spot on. Those two downtown car showrooms that face onto the Don Valley, and rather define that part of the valley architecturally, have often struck me as the sort of buildings that could quite easily be adapted as art galleries, or condos, or maybe even performance spaces ... once automobiles are outlawed. My earlier comment, about opera houses and performance spaces in other parts of the world that have been built recently and express similar comfy Modernist values, also ties into this approach.
 
Urban Shocker said:
Nope, that was AP and I. I don't know what we are.
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It was really just a one-time thing. Normally we're on very different balconies.

Adore your Klaus Nomi-esque new avatar by the way!
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6yGc7V24jizra6wkcUBD8v2io1_500.jpg

Patrizio di Renzo for Majo Fruithof
Such phenomenal work.

As for the generational thing, can anyone born and raised in the '50s and '60s, and growing up with sensible Modernism, take all that seriously the excesses of either visually loud starchitect spectacle or historicist Cheddingtonista pastiche? There seems to be a continuum of absurdity where they meet up on the far horizon and merge together. To a gay man of my generation the former is a bit like the little twink at a party who won't shut up when you're trying to talk to someone interesting, and the latter is like the piss-elegant old closet queens we encountered in the 'gay lib' '70s when everyone else was coming out of the closet.
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Yeah, and I can't really go there. I touch on that idea when I say it's not unlike your parents being unable to understand their kids music, while still maintaining that their music is not only relevant, but the only thing relevant.

It's like trying to convince the editors of a business magazine that pink is just a colour, and that it doesn't in fact make their content gay. I don't think there are solvents strong enough to remove the dye from some types of wool.

adma's point about the adaptability of Modernist buildings is spot on. Those two downtown car showrooms that face onto the Don Valley, and rather define that part of the valley architecturally, have often struck me as the sort of buildings that could quite easily be adapted as art galleries, or condos, or maybe even performance spaces ... once automobiles are outlawed. My earlier comment, about opera houses and performance spaces in other parts of the world that have been built recently and express similar comfy Modernist values, also ties into this approach.
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All buildings are adaptable though. We love converting old polluted warehouses into spaces for polluted artists, or in the case of BMW - polluting cars. That modernist sheds should also be infinitely adaptable doesn't say much extra about them.
 
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My guess: when the COC started this process this building wasn't the one they had in mind. It became the final product because of rounds and rounds of budget concessions.
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This is what scares me about modernism. It is certainly a default workhorse. But it is also the cut-corners, do-it-on-the-cheap default because of its relentless efficiency.
If we were ever to enter a period of prolonged depression or even decline, cheap, prefeb moderism would be all that would ever be built. Just boxes for everyone, everywhere.

But that doesn't mean moderism isn't spectacular when it is done right. The decline of PoMo has seen a whole lotta new modernist -or I suppose you could say modernist revival - buildings return on the skyline.
At some point you'd have to call what is being built revival since there has been a PoMo period in the middle and you'd have every right to call the modern buildings being put up now "faux modern" since they are copying what is now an historical style 1950-1980 (ish).
 
But was it "in the middle"? Mostly, PoMo seems to be about styling and a failed attempt to "bury" Modernism that ran out of steam pretty quickly.

I like Marc Boutin's term "comfy Modernism" to describe what we do here. I see more of a continuity than a discontinuity with the firms that built concrete Toronto in the '50s and '60s and '70s; the second or third generation of architects who worked for those firms, or those who left those firms to start their own, produce buildings informed by the same practical design principles today.

Cheap, prefab Modernism - boxes for everyone, everywhere - was the basis for rebuilding Europe after WW2. Perhaps it will be needed again, in some form, who knows? I doubt if much would have been rebuilt if all they'd had was a small bunch of preening, jetlagged starchitects demanding huge fees and turning down anything that wasn't a high-end cultural project. Neither PoMo nor high fashion starchitecture ( a Johnson Chippendale haircut here, a Gehry cowlick there ... ) were reinventions of the wheel, and Modernism is just as much of a practical fall-back position for Gehry ( his AGO galleries are mostly rectilinear boxes with white walls similar to many other galleries - our own Power Plant, for instance ) as it is for Jack Diamond
 
lawsond said:
If we were ever to enter a period of prolonged depression or even decline, cheap, prefeb moderism would be all that would ever be built. Just boxes for everyone, everywhere.
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Not so sure; in practice, it might instead be a spartan, stripped-down, vaguely (though not grossly) retro-ish vocabulary with gables, porches, and all that prevails. Kind of like our version of "Katrina houses"; or a sequel to the Grow Home of a generation ago, or indeed to the ultimate in "boxes for everyone, everywhere", the classic CMHC wartime-and-then-postwar matchbox. Which, lest we forget, were Cape Cod rather than Bauhaus or even "50s contemporary" a la Don Mills--which, lest we also forget, were likely meant as an antidote to the monotony of the CMHC matchbox...
 
... and I don't see US and Lawsond at odds here, necessarily. The current round of modernism is retro in its inspiration, even if it is a continuation of a strong design movement in Toronto, one doesn't negate the other.

For me modernism works well, very well, when it is the exception not the rule which is why i think it gained popularity in Toronto in the first place, as a simple optimistic foil to the fusty ornate clutter of Toronto's streets. We do this even better now in embracing both the ornate and the minimalist in the powerful contrasts that result, as at the Distillery or the ROM or the AGO or The National Ballet School or so many other examples. This is the essence of Toronto where a pure modernism as an overall design lingua franca specifically seems to leave us wanting when it lacks a humanizing foil, which may be the reason why we seem to instinctively reach for gables and porches and doodads and so on.
 
But was it "in the middle"? Mostly, PoMo seems to be about styling and a failed attempt to "bury" Modernism that ran out of steam pretty quickly.
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Yes, you may be right. Though modernism really fell off the radar for most of two decades between 1980 and 2000. Even Scotiabank has some PoMo elements as someone else pointed out. I guess the point I was trying to make in a roundabout way is that labels like "faux" and "revival" can be seen as subjective. You could make an argument that modernism being built today is retro and/or revival or faux. To me, anything that is built in any style is living architecture.
Even One St. Thomas - God help me. i continue to defend it as legit and living and not some tarted up mummy from another age.

As for Adma's point re: Katrina houses. There does seem to be some human instinct to "doll up" the tiniest box. And dire times might even bring out that instinct even more strongly.

Also, the cape cod style I think derives from the yummy, spare Georgian period and also seems to be a default when economy is fashionable even though it's two centuries old.
 
Yes, the Georgians did lovely things with proportion, and restraint. Which makes today's faux versions, such as those monstrous things on Scollard - even if the Age of Reason had continued and the 19th and 20th centuries had never happened and they somehow expressed the values of 2009 - all the more depressing.
 
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