[building babel]

The progressive public mood in the early '70's was with Sewell and the Save-Union Station-From-Metro Centre reformists. I don't think that what we now might characterize as NIMBY-ism would have seemed as wrong-headed to many progressive people in those days.

Wouldn't being pro Metro Centre in 1971 have been seen as akin to being pro-urban renewal? In the aftermath of, say, the battle against the Trefann Court urban renewal housing project, tearing down whole residential neighbourhoods for urban renewal and building Metro Centre high rise towers on vacant railway lands would have been seen as part of the same discredited urban renewal movement. Pro-development politicians were swept from power in the pro-reform election of 1972.

I think if this forum had been around in 1971 our opinions might have mirrored the mood of those times, with social issues rather than architectural ( "modernism" ) concerns taking the lead.

 

[fiendishlibrarian]

Just so we know what we're talking about:

www.emporis.com/en/wm/cx/?id=109637

 

[shawnmicallef]

The back cover of the new Spacing has a full colour spread of the proposed metro centre circa 1971, complete with three-legged CN Tower.

 

[building babel]

Cool. 30 or 40 years hence, the "young people" of the future will discover images of unbuilt masterpieces of kitsch like Trump and Sapphire and wave them about with a similar sense of glee.

 

[shawnmicallef]

Indeed. We should make flags and have a parade. The Coulda-been Parade.

 

[building babel]

Shawn: Is 'Spacing' ever planning to reproduce images of Claes Oldenburg's proposals for giant fantasy structures for Toronto? They date from the late '60's when he had an AGO show. There are three, I believe - a giant drainpipe with an airport on the top and people swimming up there, and water gushing out the base, is one. There's also a buried drainpipe monument I think. An Oldenburg book came out a few years ago with the images. The drainpipe was intended to go where the CN Tower was eventually built.

 

[unimaginative2]

You know what needs to be dragged out again? That big Buckminster Fuller pyramid affair.

 

[building babel]

The Downsview Park project is already beginning to feel like a sadly unrealized and half forgotten blast from the past.

 

[adma]

I think if this forum had been around in 1971 our opinions might have mirrored the mood of those times, with social issues rather than architectural ( "modernism" ) concerns taking the lead.

Perhaps...possibly...though who knows whether other forums/venues might have been more congenial to that. But one thing's for sure; skyscrapercity types would have been heavily go-go-Andrews...

 

[shawnmicallef]

babel> i hadn't heard of that project. i fwded your thoughts to the other editors too. we need you as special consultant to Spacing. well, perhaps many members of this board in general.

 

[building babel]

I have a copy of the book where they're reproduced ( I forget which U.S. museum has the original drawings ) which I can show you sometime.

I can't imagine what consulting services this skanky ol' design ho could possibly offer your group, or anyone else for that matter, but whatever they are you're all quite welcome to them.

 

[shawnmicallef]

Do you know how many times i've (poorly) reconstructed your stories about places/events around toronto when on walks? You should come on walks with us. We're messy though in our practice, and some of the boys smell like goats.

 

[shawnmicallef]

I was at Coach House last week talking to one of their graphic designers and he said he did this project when the CN was built to mark the "fall zone"...he put these posters up around the periphery:

 

[building babel]

In one of Christopher Isherwood's books ( 'Christopher And His Kind' I think ) he tells how his uncle once paid his groom five Pounds to go without bathing for a month - and said he smelled exactly like a fox at the end of it.

 

[building babel]

I remember that poster! Everything becomes a treasured collectable if you hang onto it long enough, I guess. I wish I'd kept the elegant Theo Dimson theatre posters I ripped down off walls around town in the early '70's.