Sneak preview of $5-million facelift
Makeover signals start of a system-wide renewal for Toronto's tired subway, but some consider the changes 'cheap and obvious'
Apr 06, 2008 04:30 AM
Leslie Scrivener
Feature Writer
It's a gritty, dreary ride on Toronto's subway lines as commuters pass stained terrazzo, mouldy wall tiles and gaping ceilings.
Is the system outdated and dingy? Or just in need of a good scrub?
Grubbiness aside, there are many who find the slightly retro aesthetic of the underground pleasing. Clean it up, by all means, but don't tamper with the stations' original, modernist design, especially those on the Bloor-Danforth line, they say.
All has changed at Museum station, however. There's a new look, signalling a system-wide renewal. On Tuesday, the full artfulness of a $5-million station makeover will be revealed when the black shrouds around the new support columns are removed.
They're not just any load bearing columns, but are based on artifacts displayed in the Royal Ontario Museum – a First Nations' house post, a figure representing the Egyptian god Osiris, replicas of imperial Chinese columns from the Forbidden City, pristine Doric columns from Ancient Greece and a column based on a Toltec figurine at the Gardiner Ceramic Museum.
The trackside walls have sleek aluminums panels instead of tiles. There's a bold new MUSEUM sign on the walls, with hieroglyphics contained in each letter that come from the tomb of an Egyptian nobleman who died around 2,300 BC.
This is the first of three station renovations planned on the University line, a cultural corridor that includes Osgoode station, beside the Opera House, and St. Patrick, a few minutes' walk from the Art Gallery of Ontario.
"The concept is to connect the cultural reality above ground with the station below ground," says Rahul Bhardwaj, president and CEO of the Toronto Community Foundation, which contributed $2 million to the Museum station redesign. (The province put in $2 million and the Toronto Transit Commission, the final million.)
Improvements to Osgoode and St. Patrick stations are not likely to begin anytime soon. "Do we have a big account with all this money sitting in it? No," says Bhardwaj. While Diamond + Schmitt Architects submitted proposals for all three stations (you can see them on the firm's website), their Museum station plan caught people's attention, says architect Gary McCluskie, and that kick-started fundraising for the renovation. Designs for Osgoode and St. Patrick will go to a public art competition.
Pleasing as the Museum redesign is, not everyone approves. "Toy columns, the tackiest thing ever," says Joe Clark, an expert on TTC typography and a dedicated blogger on TTC style.
Matthew Blackett, publisher of
spacing magazine, says the impulse to make the station "a little kitschy" was probably a good one. "It's kind of fun; kids on trips use the Museum station a lot." But he finds the new reno "cheap and obvious."
Blackett also fears there could be vandalism on the stylized columns. "That's the charm of (original) TTC stations – you can fix them."
(Vandalism
was a worry, but the architects say the columns, which are cast concrete and glass-reinforced, are durable. The concrete is infused with colour – it's not painted on – and there's a tough surface coating.)
The subway line is dear to Blackett's heart, so much so that he created a set of buttons – showing the tiles and the TTC's unique typeface – to honour the stations' iconic status. He has sold 100,000, though from the very start the TTC declined to give him a hearing when he approached its marketing department.
It's the threat to the harmonious beauty of the Bloor-Danforth line that troubles him most.
Last month, transit commissioners decided not to protect the '60s-era design of the Bloor-Danforth line – calm, functional, with a subtle palette of colours that flow discreetly one into another from station to station – but to permit "unique" designs for most subway stations.
The commission is happy to keep four stations in the original template: High Park, Keele, Coxwell and Woodbine. These stations are in reasonably good shape.
"I'm adamant – if they start renovating the aesthetics of one station, they've ruined the entire line's aesthetics," says Blackett, who's a graphic artist.
He doesn't quarrel with the need for modernization and accessibility. But he says the attitude of devaluing the subway – and 40 years of Toronto history – is like the demolition of Victorian and Georgian houses in the 1960s. "The subway stations speak clearly to a time period in Toronto. I have no problem with crazy-ass subway stations that will come with the Yonge extensions, but don't mess with your heritage."
TTC typography expert Clark says he, too, is in favour of renovating old subway stations, making them accessible and resolving problems like water infiltration and other signs of decay.
"A lot are dumps," he says. But he points out that two-thirds of the system's 69 subways stations have some degree of design consistency. There's a symmetry that needs to be preserved, even if lighting needs to be upgraded and corroded surfaces fixed.
Plain and simple as it is, Toronto needs to value its mid-century design, he argues. "We celebrate the TD Centre, because a foreign architect did it. The names of the architects of the Toronto subway have been lost to history ...
"No one would think about knocking down the TD Centre, but they wouldn't think twice about replacing tiles at Pape station with fake stone and plastic panels."
The TTC plan is to modernize one station a year, at an average cost of about $6 million each. It's part of the wider, $275-million upgrading program that includes functional changes including elevators and second entrances. Meanwhile, there's more money in the 2008 TTC budget to hire more janitors and painters for station upkeep.
Some transit enthusiasts are aghast at the prospect of tricked-up stations – "philistinism ... fake Helvetica on plastic panels," groans Clark. But TTC chair Adam Giambrone says he's getting "positive" feedback from riders. And, he adds, some stations will preserve a small section of the original design somewhere on the premises.
"The unique look is exciting," says Giambrone. "People want to see their public space rejuvenated, they want to see art in the station, they want to see bold design."
Starting later this year, Pape station will be the first to be modernized, with a $20.8-million budget that includes new elevators, a second exit and a new roof. There's the art that Giambrone speaks of – up to 80 abstract and textured photo-based images of the station and neighbourhood as they are today, before the renovation, by Kitchener artist Allan Harding MacKay. "At least through this approach," says MacKay, "we can retain some of the sense of what neighbourhood and the architecture of the stations looked like."
Work on Dufferin station will begin in 2009, followed by Bloor-Yonge in 2010. Again, the idea is that each station reflect the character of its neighbourhood.
But if the TTC wants art in the subway, there's nothing to stop it from commissioning and installing art without destroying the existing design of the system and without bundling it into a multi-million-dollar reconstruction program, says transit activist Steve Munro. "There are lots of blank walls with boring advertising that would look much nicer with art," says Munro, whose decades of advocacy work earned him a Jane Jacobs Prize, given to the city's unsung heroes.
As for the Museum renovation, he sees its beauty but adds that it's a huge investment in one station. "It's a vanity project," he says. "A nice show-off piece. The station was in good shape; the tiles were in good shape. It would have been way down the list for renovation ... This is the same system that can't find two pennies to rub together to run the buses.
"They could have spent that money on a larger number of stations and had a much greater effect."
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