Toronto is not New York, or Sao Paolo, or Beirut, or Shanghai, or Wagga Wagga. Our architects cannot but produce work that reflects our culture, rather than theirs.
 
“For me, the Toronto Style is more about accepting our connection to, and grounding in, a strongly Modernist post-WW2 tradition - and how it informs our present.â€

I would buy that a preponderance of new Toronto buildings do follow somewhat the four-direction linear traditions of post WWII residential highrises. It is a popular form in the cityscape and at rudimentary level can be found in many of the new highrises. But surely this doesn't qualify it as a Toronto style, at best a quasi Toronto sub-genre of an established style that all large cities have their take on.



Just wondering: How is this the work of, as Babel mentioned, our 'avant garde' best? I don't get that at all. Is every highrise building by TO architects that break from this 'tradition' considered inferior architecture?
 
babel:
For me personally, I am no longer attempting to locate a definition of Toronto style/school that helps us to distinguish our neo-Modern buildings from others. But this has come up again, so I'll bite. How do you reconcile your statement that "Toronto is not New York, or Sao Paolo, or Beirut, or Shanghai, or Wagga Wagga. Our architects cannot but produce work that reflects our culture, rather than theirs" with your earlier comments about the TD Centre, which is a fine building but one that could be anywhere?

That you make this statement as it if is self-evident and requires no proof is also puzzling to me, given the obvious cross-cultural and internationalist tendencies in architecture. When I walk down in street in, yes, Sao Paolo or Wagga Wagga I do in fact see buildings that in their every detail could have been built in Toronto. I can point my finger at a building in Los Angeles and say "1965, or maybe, 66" and be correct about it. I do this not because I've studied those buildings or know a lot about the architecture in LA, but because I know about the architecture in Toronto (and in some other cities). If local culture is not the only determinant of architectural style, then it is not self-evident as you suggest that Toronto buildings will reflect our culture.

What I really don't understand is that I think it's far more interesting to analyse a building or a group of buildings, like the ones you admire, and demonstrate what they seem to inherit from their counterparts in other cities, and what remains behind that is uniquely Toronto. Saying that they simply cannot not be different seems, well, a bland approach to me. Kind of like, "well, sheesh, they're in the, you know, "canon" now so we don't actually have to, like, discuss them or anything".

But I think ultimately what I'm asking is that is you show me, don't tell me. It is not enough to state that our architects cannot but produce works that reflects our culture, you must tell me how you see that reflected in the actual buildings themselves. Then I would be able to apply that to my own understanding of the built environment around me.

bogtrotter:

I think that the works babel mentioned are indeed some of the best our city has to offer, thought avant garde is also something that would have to be proven rather than stated. Regarding interior architecture, I guess it depends on who's making that call (which is quite a different thing from stating that all opinions are equally valid).
 
On another note, I went down to see the rendering and model of Lumiere today. Very nice, sort of like 22 meets One City Hall.
 
Lumiere

It does look like a tall version of One City Hall. Maybe Two City Hall may look somewhat like Lumiere.
 
"I think that the works babel mentioned are indeed some of the best our city has to offer, thought avant garde is also something that would have to be proven rather than stated."

I agree, but only because I happen to like the International style as well. But of course the more it adheres to this style the safer the work is from criticism. The work of these architects doesn't seem to me to be 'avant-gard' at all, at least in the true sense of the word. Are they not inspired by a form of universal architecture which was designed to be truly that- 'could go anywhere'...? Are there elements or subtleties in these buldings that make them unique to this city? I don't think there is. I don't buy the argument that jsut because they are designed by Toronto architects in a four-cornered tradition that they are inherently of a 'Toronto style'.

One would think that the more truly avant gard' buildings are the ones that break from the ubiquitous 1950-1970's apt blocks in this city..?
 
I knew that the term avant garde was a bit iffy as soon as I used it. But my reading of the local scene is that what we've seen over the past 20 years is a consolidation of the influence of the young firms from the late 1980's, such as KPMB, who clearly found PoMo an inadequate language ... and that these architects are still calling the creative shots in their advancing years. They've branched out into condos, community centres, museums, you name it, and haven't been ousted by anything more stylistically appropriate to suit our times. They're a sort of establishment avant garde.
 
"I guess it depends on who's making that call (which is quite a different thing from stating that all opinions are equally valid)."

People like Hume for instance.
 
"For me, the Toronto Style is more about accepting our connection to, and grounding in, a strongly Modernist post-WW2 tradition - and how it informs our present. For others, it appears to be about "compare-and-contrast" with similar buildings produced in other cities as a way of negating the value of what we do here."

This rings true to me, and is why I prefer a self-referential approach to defining the Toronto style. It will also prove far more meaningful and practical to us when discussing Toronto buildings, as well as when contrasting them with designs elsewhere; contrasting the 'Vancouver style' for buildings rising there with the Toronto style for buildings rising here, etc.

"It is not enough to state that our architects cannot but produce works that reflects our culture, you must tell me how you see that reflected in the actual buildings themselves. Then I would be able to apply that to my own understanding of the built environment around me."

Perhaps with architecture more so than with certain other art forms, given the scale and permanence involved, the imprint of culture as an influence can be seen. For instance, as has been mentioned already, although the TD Centre could have been built anywhere, what is more important to our self-referential definition is the fact that it *was* built here: the desire or forces in play to build it in the first place, the choosing of the building/design, the commissioning of the firm, the social and economic conditions, the underlaying desire of the city to dust off the cobwebs of its past and move forward boldly etc, etc. To put it another way, why didn't the TD Centre end up looking like some mock version of the Empire State Building (as a random example only)? The fact that it is the TD Centre, and that it was built here is extremely telling.

If we agree that the foundations of the Toronto style are found in the post-war era, then maybe we can postulate that neo-modernism, as practised in Toronto, is a local revisiting of that clean and modern post-war optimism? If this is the case then I would also suggest that we should not be lead astray by the strict box form of the International Style, which would be more accurate in describing the first post-war wave or movement of building in Toronto of the 60s and 70s than in describing the one that we are now seeking to define. To me, the Toronto Style is as much about a conflict with pure modernism as it about a nod to it; where 'breaking the box' so to speak is fundamental to this latest wave of building by local architects, whether in the form of a subtle wave-style roof, or in the form of one rounded corner to three square ones, etc.
 
The TD is full of paradoxes: International ... but here. As 'anywhere' as anything Mies did, but enhancing the prestige of this particular city. Built in the 1960's and symbolically granting Hogtown the imprimatur of official alpha male Modernism, after the legwork done by local architects in the 1940's and 1950's. Not a creation of our culture, but a foreign import after an earlier Canadian design had been rejected.

I like to visualize the TD as a kind of qualitative fulcrum on which our values pivot - the past pressing down on one side in order to raise the hopes and aspirations for a future that we're now living in.
 
For me, the Toronto Style is more about accepting our connection to, and grounding in, a strongly Modernist post-WW2 tradition - and how it informs our present.
Click to expand...

But the odd thing is that if we really look at the broad post-WW2 scheme, that's when such things as "historical awareness", the preservation movement etc really took blossom, no?

It's not an argument against any Modern-based "Toronto Style", or even against preferring it--however, it may be an argument against idealizing it as some kind of contemporary stylistic monoculture, i.e. don't let the enlightened-style-snobbery get the best of you...
 
Hopefully some day this thread will live up to its name and we will actually get a rendering of the building.
 
There was one in the previous dreamhomesandcondos magazine. It looks like it has the precast of One city hall, on a vertical tower like M5V. It wasn't anything ground breaking.
 
I can point my finger at a building in Los Angeles and say "1965, or maybe, 66" and be correct about it. I do this not because I've studied those buildings or know a lot about the architecture in LA, but because I know about the architecture in Toronto (and in some other cities). If local culture is not the only determinant of architectural style, then it is not self-evident as you suggest that Toronto buildings will reflect our culture.
Click to expand...

I think Babel's argument is getting an overly hard time. Not every building in Toronto reflects the local culture individually; some are generic. But the city's buildings collectively do reflect local aesthetic preferences, historical influences, economic and social trends. And some of them are unique -- even if they're just blends of familiar ideas from elsewhere. That's true of the postwar era, and it's true today.

For specifics, I would recommend the book Toronto Modern: Architecture 1945-1975, which gives a lot of history about the way different strands of modernism took root here, and buildings including Massey College, City Hall, and One Benvenuto Place.

I don't have the time to write a manifesto of the Toronto School, but if you look carefully, there is a vocabulary of forms, materials and details that is distinct. Babel, would you mind giving it a systematic try? I think that would be very interesting indeed...
 
Citywriter:

I'm in an oxygen tent right now, trying to recover from all this, but I may give it a try - though I think we've been cautioned to return to the thread topic.

( Also, thank goodness you're back. You're worse than ap. disappearing like this. Where have you been? )
 
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