[Urban Shocker]

I expect Gergiev has Four Seasons Centre envy, after his visits to Toronto, and simply wants what we've got. Having to deal with the spiralling costs and architect fees of the two previous incarnations of this thing can't have been much fun ... even in the age when Big Hair trophy buildings were still fashionable.

 

[TKTKTK]

I expect Gergiev has Four Seasons Centre envy, after his visits to Toronto, and simply wants what we've got. Having to deal with the spiralling costs and architect fees of the two previous incarnations of this thing can't have been much fun ... even in the age when Big Hair trophy buildings were still fashionable.

Sounds like the usual reasons you choose a Toyota over a Porsche.

 

[junctionist]

As for the cultural and institutional buildings that have gone up, after Mississauga City Hall was built PoMo didn't turn the heads of our local architectural community any more than starchitecture appears to have.

What an ironic thing to say given that the built form of Mississauga is overwhelmingly postmodern.

In Toronto so many libraries and public buildings were built in the postmodern style. How convenient to forget the distinct lack of modernism in the 1980s and early 1990s in Toronto. Whether it was condominiums, infill houses, office towers, or even subway stations, postmodernism was everywhere.

 

[Urban Shocker]

Well the Kitchener City Hall design competition is considered a defining moment at KPMB, and for that generation of architects - and none of the other finalists presented Mississauga City Hall-like PoMo designs either. I'm not sure what connection, if any, exists between that and the sort of developer culture condos that went up in Mississauga at that time.

 

[TKTKTK]

Well the Kitchener City Hall design competition is considered a defining moment at KPMB, and for that generation of architects - and none of the other finalists presented Mississauga City Hall-like PoMo designs either. I'm not sure what connection, if any, exists between that and the sort of developer culture condos that went up in Mississauga at that time.

And yet...the year Kitchener City Hall opened, we started building this:

 

[Urban Shocker]

... though it hardly represented a trend towards bronze gryphons on buildings - the fibreglass gargoyles on One Park Tower in Mississauga notwithstanding.

 

[TKTKTK]

... though it hardly represented a trend towards bronze gryphons on buildings - the fibreglass gargoyles on One Park Tower in Mississauga notwithstanding.

Has your account been hacked?

 

[junctionist]

... though it hardly represented a trend towards bronze gryphons on buildings - the fibreglass gargoyles on One Park Tower in Mississauga notwithstanding.

Though it did nicely represent a trend towards ornament and historical wit. Let's not forget that the City of Toronto with its iconic modernist city hall opened Metro Hall by a local firm. Postmodernism dominated public and private sector commissions of local architects.

 

[Urban Shocker]

Oh I'm not knocking the quirky little library building at all - I love it as much as the next guy - my partner used to go there all the time to read the Chinese books and magazines. Metro Hall's another story though - nobody compares it favourably to the Revell, do they? I barely even know if it's a government building any more. And it's an exaggeration to say that PoMo dominated anything, qualitatively, since it barely dented the Modernist design hegemony that still informs what gets built by our leading firms ( the opera house, those KPMB cultural buildings, all the Clewes point towers, the understated grey boxes of Freedville, the resolutely Modernist house renos going on all over the place, etc. ).

 

[TKTKTK]

And it's an exaggeration to say that PoMo dominated anything, qualitatively, since it barely dented the Modernist design hegemony that still informs what gets built by our leading firms ( the opera house, those KPMB cultural buildings, all the Clewes point towers, the understated grey boxes of Freedville, the resolutely Modernist house renos going on all over the place, etc. ).

Did Post-Modernism do that anywhere though? It was Pillars and Pediments for awhile and then back to basics.

I read an article today that reminded me of you a bit, though the author throws all of modernism out with the starchitects' bathwater:

A perfect storm for modernism

THE ECONOMY and the environment form a perfect storm for modern architecture, an indefatigable changeling of a style that has weathered storms before. Maybe at last it will sink.

Frank Gehry’s firm has had to lay off about half of its employees. The world’s premier starchitect was recently quoted as saying, “Today, if there’s frugality, I’m ready. I’ll do corrugated again.” Buildings of corrugated steel don’t sound that much more attractive than buildings of twisted titanium, but modesty might shrink modernism down a bit closer to human scale. Shrinking architecture firms and unemployed architects might stoop lower to get commissions. They might condescend to design buildings less arrogant and more lovable than what has floated the profession’s boat since the last storm threatened to capsize modern architecture.

Modernism burped off Art Deco’s rejoinder to its sterility in the 1930s. But in the 1960s and ’70s, criticism from such respected modernists as Vincent Scully, Peter Blake and Robert Venturi punctured the sanctity of modern architecture’s obviously spurious “form follows function” mantra, as if structural steel and elevators made beauty impossible. And the demolition in 1972 of the Pruitt-Igoe public-housing complex in St. Louis officially ended the pretense of utilitarian design for the common man that had inspired modernism during its early years.

The modernists-vs.-modernism crisis spawned the postmodernist movement. Often regarded by architectural historians as a reaction against orthodox modernism, PoMo is more astutely seen as a rear-guard defense of modernism. Pasting cheesy classical ornament on the usual glass boxes served to blur the distinction between the modernism tolerated by society’s elites and the traditional styles preferred by the public — at least until the modernists could regain their sea legs. An arch here, a pillar there, a wink, a nod, and you could keep your glass box. It worked. Modernism weathered the storm, evolving into the ’90s by hyperventilating its style, hooking the glass box on LSD (or Viagra? or both!) — without having to abandon the mainstay of its disdain for public taste and traditional design.

The modernists left in the lurch their bogus infatuation for “honest” utility and went straight for the money. The maestros of “egotecture” played capitalism’s corporate inferiority complex like a Stradivarius. Surfing the global economic wave, the new hypermodernism spread from the guilt-ridden economies of the West to the status-conscious economies of the developing world. The unknowable value of bundled subprime-mortgage derivatives is to the responsible operation of the free market exactly what the unfathomable allure of Frank Gehry is to the responsible principles of architecture. Corporate America’s ability to embrace the myth of endless growth was enabled by its ability to fool itself into embracing the architecture of the absurd — so long as it was totally unaffordable and unsustainable.​

(I don't really agree with the article BTW, but there are still interesting bits in it)

 

[Urban Shocker]

Here's another little ( well, not so little! ) gem. Well worth ploughing through since it poses the question: What Next? in interesting ways:

http://onedaysculpture.org.nz/assets/images/reading/terry smith.pdf

And, just to keep Archivist from hyperventilating, here's something warm and mushy about Bilbao:

http://basque.unr.edu/04/4.4.1t/jztough.pdf

 

[alklay]

The BCE towers and Scotia Plaza are fine examples of the effects of post-modernism here in the city.

 

[adma]

You can be sure that nothing Diamond designs will begin to look dated, but only because they're dated from the beginning.

Uh...really? Does this include his 60s/70s collaborations with Barton Myers (York Square, Hydro Block, Innis College, etc)? Does this include the Central YMCA? Sure, it may be 20+ years old, but how is any of that negatively "dated", i.e. as a metaphor for "undistinguished" or "expendable", or as a demonstration of Jack Diamond as an untalented hack? In which case, what *isn't* dated?

This is exactly what bugs me about this UT hate-on for Jack Diamond: that it seems so...amateurishly uninformed in assailing him for his so-called parsimony. The lot of you are truly naifs when it comes to the ins and outs of the last half century of Toronto architecture. Yeah, I know that Urban Shocker doesn't help matters with his sometimes overwrought counter-judgments...but consider what he's counter-judging against. It's almost like the kind of party line that'd deem a key 70s architectural work like Innis College to be nothing short of dismal and deserving replacement...which from a modern preservationist standpoint, is a judgment deserving horselaughs.

 

[junctionist]

Yes, losing Innis College would be dreadful. Its industrial and hi-tech elements impress. The library accessible by the functional metal staircase particularly impressed me with its secondary floors being metal platforms, where natural light floods into the narrow, stacked space through the massive skylight. Concrete mushroom columns are small but noticeable. It's seems to be an unusual aesthetic for an academic space, yet it works well.

 

[TKTKTK]

Uh...really? Does this include his 60s/70s collaborations with Barton Myers (York Square, Hydro Block, Innis College, etc)? Does this include the Central YMCA? Sure, it may be 20+ years old, but how is any of that negatively "dated", i.e. as a metaphor for "undistinguished" or "expendable", or as a demonstration of Jack Diamond as an untalented hack? In which case, what *isn't* dated?

I think his newer work looks kinda dated, certainly the 4SC looks dated. But I also think you're also taking a somewhat light-hearted eye-poking exchange a little too seriously.