And to elaborate on the culturally-bereft POV: let's remember that Ford's a jock. He views things through the prism of sporting and entertainment venues as "infrastructure". It's a realm where stadiums serve for 30 years before being imploded, once something "newer" and "fresher" takes its place.
But whether accidentally or not, he reflects how that's been the trend for *everything* over the past 3rd of a century or so. Some of it is a neoliberal "fast fashion" attitude; but some of it also echoes how the digital age differs from the analog age, where things are in a constant state of update. Or, to hang on to a "dated" concert or sporting facility might be viewed as being as silly as hanging onto older Windows platforms.
Thus the retrospective puzzlement among younger cohorts over why the loss of the OP Forum was something to be lamented has to be viewed in those kinds of terms. Like, it was old and dated, so...why not? Wasn't that doing the *right* thing?
But in that light, it's *also* worth noting that the Molson Amphitheatre/Bud Stage has *outlived* the Forum...and yet I can't imagine *any* grassroots save-the-Bud-Stage rally taking place, along the lines of what the Forum was greeted with. And it's not just about its being alien to the original Zeidler concept; it's because that's all it was conceived as--functional entertainment infrastructure. It's not *meant* to inspire preservationist rallies; all it is is a venue for entertaining people.
And let's remember, way back when this whole Doug Ford Ontario Place thing started, the *only* element exempt from provincial earmarking was...the Bud Stage. Which to those who were concerned about the fate of Zeidler's ensemble, came off like a bunch of philistine goofs in power getting the whole "value" thing inside out...
We seem to be constantly going around in circles, so I'm not sure how much I can engage on this topic as what's the point of dealing with stubborness.
Structures, especially institutional structures built during that period in the 1970s are seen to most people as hideous, what we know as "brutalism" and to a lesser extent "post modernism". Brutalism, what's the root word there, "brutal", and that's quite what a building that's mostly just a concrete slab is, very uninviting and just looks awful. This does not mean that architecture and design prior to the 1970s is bad or outdated, quite the contrary in reality.
Here are some examples around the city. Ask anyone familiar with University of Toronto to mentally think of the campus, and even those who never attended there like myself would probably envision the Hart House. No one is imagining Robarts Library as the defining structure of that place because it is in fact hideous, there's no question about it.
Think of the Toronto subway, there's a certain elegance to much of the system, how the stations and subsequent extensions all had a design criteria for the platforms, the (originally vitrolite) tile and I-beam stations. However, when they got to the Spadina subway extension, they designed stations with this very 1970s almost brutalist style that looks incredibly dated and awful. Particularly the stations which are in the median of the Allen are the worst, with Wilson taking the top spot. It's also funny that nearly 30 years later after Downsview opened, it is still a beautiful station.
You used some thing about analog and digital to try to make a point. If anything, Toronto City Hall is a place where a giant digital clock would fit in. As that's the kind of feeling I get with it. Unlike the elegant clock tower and building design next to of it of Old City Hall. Heck, even Brampton City Hall constructed in the 1990s conjures an image of one would think when they imagine a City Hall building.
As for ballparks, Atlanta's situation is an outlier more than a norm, but what happened with the design of ballparks in Major League Baseball is similar to this whole thing we're discussing. This same era was the rise of the multi-purpose stadium, which were known infamously as "concrete donuts" or "giant ashtrays", generally round buildings to host both MLB and NFL, The fan experience for either sport was bad as you couldn't have ideal sightlines for both. Similarly, this is like the analogy used regarding the futon that a certain YouTuber uses. As we know, the Skydome was the last of these kind of stadiums built.
Oriole Park in Baltimore which opened just over 30 years ago utilized a classic design, incorporating the historic rail depot in the outfield, changed the way how baseball stadiums are designed. The key here is that it was a classic design, away from that brutalism concrete designs of the 1970s, and well, every team tried to get some sort of version of this kind of ballpark. Amazingly, 30 years later with Oriole Park now actually being one of the oldest ballparks in MLB, it still ranks among the top of the lists usually of best MLB stadiums. I'm also willing to bet that Oriole Park will still be active 30 years from now. CitiField, the home of the Mets, the exterior of the stadium is clearly based on the exterior of the long gone Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers that was demolished in 1960. There is nobody who would ever want to bring back Shea Stadium's aesthics and exterior, the former home of the Mets.
One last topic though about the Children's Village, McMillan I didn't realize was the father of soft play, and soft play is what those play structures that were built in the 1980s and 1990s were clearly an evolution of. Discovery Zone was a chain that had a giant soft play structure and charged admission. At its core, what makes the Children's Village less off a "kiddieland" than say Discovery Zone or the McDonald's Playplaces (same istructures but smaller) of the 1990s? Is it because one was owned by the public sector while the other was the private sector.
