A Video Homage to Toronto's Lost Buildings

A friend of mine who is currently residing in London, England made this video homage to Toronto's lost buildings. It's difficult to watch the video without wondering about the evolving face of Toronto, and how the decisions to demolish buildings can so change the landscape of a city.

One of the biggest changes to me is Trinity College in what is now Trinity-Bellwoods Park. You can still see the gates to the college at the south end of the park along Queen Street, but all traces of the building are gone.

It's interesting to note too some of the buildings we still have that were once threatened with demolition, or partial demolition, like Old City Hall. I think one proposal had the whole building gone with its replacement being an Eaton's Centre tower, while a revised proposal kept just the old clock tower. Thankfully neither of those were realized and the building was left standing.

But with the neglect, partial collapse, then fire and planned demolition of a heritage building on Yonge street recently, it's clear that we still have some ways to go in protecting our heritage buildings.

Why I Am Terrified Of Robarts Library

When I first saw Robarts at the University of Toronto I thought: Strange, why would they build a fortress in the middle of campus? And then I saw people leaving with books and I thought: Oh.

There is something compelling though about its monolithic stature and futuristic design. If someone had asked George Orwell to design a government building for the future, it would probably look a lot like Robarts: intimidating, foreboding, and comprised of concrete peaks and towers with very few windows. Basically, a real good place to conduct top secret illegal business and immoral public experiments without anyone finding out.

I've attempted to study a few times within its hulk, but haven't lasted long. There's something horror movie-like to me about its layout and design. Maybe it has to do with the flickering, buzzing halogen lights that come slowly to life as you walk by as if some ghost is trailing you turning them on and off. Maybe it's the glass-enclosed study rooms that bare a frightening resemblance to the cell that housed Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs. Maybe it's the skinny doorways lining the edges of each floor that lead, so I'm told, to PHd study rooms but which look more like small torture chambers.

I recently made a trip to Robarts after Christmas to get out a few books and found the place eerily empty. If I thought Robarts was scary even when it was filled with sniffly students then this new, deserted Robarts was absolutely terrifying. I walked past the "guard", flashed my U of T card and entered the bank of elevators, which whisked me up several storeys and opened onto one of those atriums that look more like the set for a lazer tag battle than a place to study.

As I walked through the stacks, lights flickering to life and then extinguishing behind me, I couldn't help one thought creep and take hold at the edge of my mind: zombies. I imagined them coming out of the darkness between two book shelves, banging their decaying hands on the glass walls of a study room, sneaking up behind me as I attempted to find my call number. If I was going to film a zombie movie in Toronto, the first place that would get overrun with the flesh-eating monstrosities would be Robarts.

Of course, not everyone feels this way about Robarts. For example, these gents felt that their love for the library was best expressed through a rap song.

photo one: credit

photo two: mine

photo three: mine

Solar Homes, Iceberg Homes, Animal-shaped Cities, Bike Corrals, and Hacked Billboards & Websites

Architect Ralph Disch builds Heliotrope: the world's first energy positive solar home. It rotates to follow the sun where ever it goes. Except at night.

Daniel Andersson imagines the Iceberg house in Finland: a floating house that shows only its tip above water. Soon to follow: the first cruise ship sunk by striking a house.

Southern Sudan unveils plans to build animal shaped cities. It's like animal crackers, except instead of eating them you live inside them.

Vancouver grocery store owner credits the city's "hippy mayor" for on street bicycle corral that fits 18 bikes outside his store on Commercial Drive.

A group of Toronto artist's take it upon themselves to hack illegal billboards and replace the advertisements with their own art. In a twist of irony, the Toronto website illegalsigns.ca has also been hacked, but of a different less artistic nature.

The Architecture of Suicide

A few weeks ago now, I was riding my bike down Bloor Street and eventually came to the Prince Edward Viaduct, where the curious architecture of the bridge caught my attention -- a vast net strung up around us. It was as if we were nestled in the world's largest game of cat's cradle.

As it turns out the "net" is actually something called the "Luminous Veil", an anti-suicide barrier installed in 2003 and designed by Derek Revington at the University of Waterloo. Previous to the installation of the veil the viaduct had garnered the infamous distinction of being the most popular bridge in the city for suicides.

All around the viaduct are signs of its unintended use. On each side of the road at the east end of the viaduct there are large signs with a 24 hour phone number beneath for those who feel they need help. And below those, a conveniently installed phone booth. (On a sidenote: there is also a plaque instructing passers-by that this bridge was the one featured in the opening scenes of Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin of a Lion -- in which a woman falls off the bridge and is saved).

However, 7 years after the installation of the veil, it seems that while suicides from the bridge dropped from an average of 9.3 a year to zero a year, the overall suicide rate for the City of Toronto remained virtually unchanged.

The construction of the veil raises questions surrounding the social function of architecture: Can modifications to the built environment act as a kind of inanimate helping hand? Is the presence of a sign and a phone booth a kind of off-site social worker? And what happens when a piece of infrastructure is hi-jacked for an unintended purpose, especially one so heartbreaking?

It makes me wonder, too, why people choose certain bridges over others. I have heard that people will actually travel some distance to get to the Golden Gate Bridge in order to jump off of it. There is even a film about it called The Bridge. How does that lure get developed? In the report on the Prince Edward Viaduct the authors say:

The argument for putting a barrier on a notorious bridge as a suicide prevention tool is predicated on the idea that individuals contemplating suicide have a preference for that bridge over others in the area. "Suicide magnet" may be a particularly apt term that has been used to describe suicide bridges in the sense that different "magnets" have the ability to exert different amounts of pull and presumably, the more pull a "magnet" exerts the less interchangeable it is with other locations. p. 11

So, perhaps even in their most isolated state people yearn for a connection with others -- with something greater -- even if that connection is through death. Jumping off a certain bridge then becomes a statement or symbol, an induction into a community. However, the authors then conclude that the Prince Edward Viaduct was obviously not a strong "magnet" as suicides just moved to other bridges or means.

After I graduated high school, I heard that a student there had left a note saying he was going to jump off of a bridge in the area. Then he drove his car to a completely different bridge got out and, according to one witness, took off his shoes and simply walked off the edge. Would the Luminous Veil have prevented this? What if there had been a phone? Or maybe he would have simply got into his car and driven over to that other bridge instead.

Design Success!, Design Fail!, iPhone Architecture Tours, High Speed Rail, and a Land of Giants

If you feel in a positive mood, you can check out this list of the top 20 urban planning successes of all time and see if you agree. Spoiler: Vancouver's Granville Island makes it to number 7.

Or if you feel in a negative mood, you can check out the 10 worst design fails of the past 25 years, instead. My personal favourite being the waterpark filled with colourful penises.

The Netherlands Architecture Institute launches Urban Augmented Reality, a smartphone app that will allow you to point your phone's camera at a building and instantly see information on that building, including past images and future projects. Definitely a handy tool for locals and tourists who want to know more about the city as they're walking around and don't want to take the time to do it the old fashioned way and look it up on Wikipedia.

On August 11th, the groundbreaking for the Transbay Transit Center -- a high-speed rail station that will link San Francisco with Los Angeles -- took place. The 2.25 billion project will see trains running at 354 km/h with a travel time between the two cities of about two and a half hours. Watch this beautiful 3D rendering of the future station and be consumed by jealousy (unless you live in SF).

Choi + Shine Architects re-design the boring electrical tower into a stunning Land of Giants, proving that infrastructure we long ago shrugged off as a necessary evil can be turned into imaginative and though-provoking architectural wizardries.

Parkour and the City as a Playground

Years ago when I was in one the earlier years of my undergrad degree at UBC, I took a film course with a guy who seemed to be highly caffeinated at all times and would constantly be bouncing off the walls. And I mean, literally bouncing off the walls. We would be out on campus and he would take a running leap toward an inverted corner of a building and, using one side as leverage against another, run halfway up the building.

At the time, I had never heard of Parkour -- my friend called it something like "freerunning", which to me didn't entirely encapsulate the craziness of what he did -- but in the time since it has become far more popular. A Toronto chapter even offers lessons. The definition (on the American Parkour website) says that "Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one's path by adapting one's movement to the environment."

Translation: They're like monkeys released into the built environment.

They swing off bars, run up walls, jump across the chasms of buildings only to land perfectly on a narrow ledge, flip off roofs, and engage in any other number of gravity- and fear-defying acts.

Basically, Parkour is -- like street art -- a re-imagining of the urban landscape. Where graffiti and street artists use the city as a canvass or a giant installation project, the practitioners of Parkour (traceurs) use the city as one sprawling, integrated jungle gym. The movements can be so fluid that they seem connect buildings, almost knitting the city together and making it seem like a cohesive whole instead of solitary structures sitting near each other and separated by alleyways, guard rails and walls. Where I see a barrier I have to walk around, they see something that can be leaped over.

So, I guess I disagree with the last little bit of the American Parkour definition. Although it is definitely about adapting your movements to the environment, it is also about adapting the environment to your movements and that's where the real creativity of it comes in. You have to have the ability to look at architecture and see something other than a building or wall or a railing; you have to look and see the possibility of movement, which ultimately makes Parkour a pretty artistic practice as well as a physical one. Afterall, one of other names for it is l'art du déplacement, which translate as the art of movement.

Often I think we get caught up in seeing the city and our environment in a routine way, and so it's jarring and kind of exhilarating to watch someone take your assumption about what the city can be used for and shatter it. Also, it's just damn cool to watch.

First image source.

Second image source.

Busses you can drive beneath, super high-speed trains, Soviet-style Tetris, vertical gardens, and a fake cloud in New York

China plans to build huge busses that you can drive underneath, with construction of the first 186km track to be started at the end of the year. But wait! China's not finished yet! They're also building a maglev train that will be capable of ground speeds of up to 1000km/h. After riding the GO train to Niagara Falls from Toronto a few days ago, a 1000km/h high-speed train is almost unimaginable.

But let's say you don't really care about crazy busses and high-speed trains and are more into, oh, I don't know, building Soviet-style apartment blocks in a giant game of Tetris. Well, now you can! Or, you can at least watch a video of how it's done.

Spain has created a six-story vertical garden in the town square of San Vincente del Raspeig, which to me looks like a big green patch-work quilt thrown over a building.

Architects, NAMELESS, propose a fake cloud in New York called PlayCloud, which, in my opinion, should be renamed The Big Giant White Jellyfish.

Inception and the Architecture of Dreams

Yesterday I saw the film Inception, a sci-fi puzzle thriller that proposes the idea that we can go into other people's dreams (or invite them into ours), design a dream world for them that they then fill with their own subconscious meanderings, and proceed to extract information. Aside from a few stodgy lines of dialogue and some melodramatic acting, the film was fairly mind-blowing, and all the more because it dealt with the subject of architecture in the rule-free world of our dreaming mind.

Designing a dream world would be any architect or urban planners own wet dream. Not only would you be able to walk around your fully-formed designs, but you could bend physics to create twisted, paradoxical structures. It would be the ultimate form of uninhibited creation, as Ellen Page's character, a promising young architecture student, points out.

Escher's Ascending and Descending staircase is used as an example in the film, and it's a good one. What would Escher have done if he could have created the dream worlds he put to paper? If he could have had the chance to walk inside them?

[M. C. Escher, Ascending and Descending, 1960. 35.5 cm × 28.5 cm]

Just imagine: a giant game of Sim City where you are walking the streets instead of perched above with your birds-eye view. You come to a spot where a bridge would be nice, so you create one--and then watch how people use it, how it affects traffic. You keep walking and decide that instead of a skyscraper the spot should be a public plaza, so you get rid of the tower and insert the plaza, but then you notice that the buildings around the plaza mean that no sunlight will ever hit it--so you shorten them.

How would this change the way we build cities and buildings? Would we grow underwhelmed by the architectural possibilities of the real world? By the constraints of physics and material? Or would it allow more creativity, more risk-taking, simply for the fact that you could test it out before spending millions or billions of dollars to actually build the thing.

[M. C. Escher, Balcony, 1945. 55 x 65 cm]

What would architects like Buckminster Fuller, Rem Koolhaas, and Frank Gehry create if they could design a dream world without physical limitations? What kind of world would Tim Burton make? Stanley Kubrick? Stephen King? I wonder if Le Corbusier had gotten the chance to walk the streets of his Radiant City -- his towers in the park -- would he have stuck with the design?

Maybe one day 3D modelling will advance to the point where architects and planners actually have this ability to enter their creations and invite developers, government officials, citizens, and whoever else, inside that same world to give them a guided tour of what exactly they'd like to build.

I also think of the Salvador Dali Museum, still under construction in St. Petersburg, Florida. The inside of the building features a coiled staircase, like a spring pulled apart, while the outside is a concrete box being engulfed by a bulbous glass amoeba. But what would Dali himself have created, if he could use this dream-world technology to build one for himself? How wonderful and frightening and strange it would be to walk that world.

© HOK + Beck Group

Urbanized Film, Plastic Jug Planters, 21 Architectural Marvels, More Electronic Billboards?, and Fishy Frank Gehry

Gary Hustwit, director of the documentaries Helvetica and Objectified, says his next project, to complete the "Design Trilogy" will be a film titled Urbanized that will explore ideas related to urban design.

Old, plastic jugs turned decorative planters pop up in London.

Vanity Fair lists 21 architectural marvels. Expect some of the usual suspects. Rem Koolhaas makes the list three times. Canadian buildings completely absent.

John Lorinc writes about the renewal of upper Yonge Street in Toronto, featuring...more electronic billboards a la Yonge & Dundas Square?

Frank Gehry clears the air on his fishy inspiration.

Officer Collisions, Credit Card Transit, Bicycle Rush Hour, Surrey's New Library, & Affordable Vancouver Condos

An article in the Boston Globe, Trooper Down, Why drivers hit officers on the side of the road, discusses the phenomenon of how police, even when wearing visibility jackets and standing near the flashing lights of their police cars, get hit on the road.

Marcus Gee in The Globe & Mail enumerates the reasons why an Open-payments system is the right track for the Toronto Transit Commission, something I totally agree with as, coming from Vancouver, dealing with tokens and flimsy paper transfers is driving me batty.

And check out the best rush hour in the world, which takes place on two wheels in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Surrey City Centre Library by Bing Thom Architects looks to be an impressive structure and a forward thinking one as well since it will be built larger than currently necessary in anticipation of future use--something that perhaps the people over at the Translink and the BC Government should have thought about when they built the short platforms of the Canada Line.

Vancouver developer Ian Gillespie, the same that brought the upscale Shangri-La Vancouver, and architect Gregory Henriquez, the same that designed Woodward's, are experimenting with affordable condos near downtown Vancouver. How they do it? No parking spaces, for one.

City as Panoramic Skyline

posted in altered form on Beyond Robson.

Brent Toderian, Vancouver city planner, will see a proposal before Vancouver city council in late January to allow four buildings (three on West Georgia, one on Burrard) higher than the usual allowed, one with a height of a possible 700ft. For some perspective, Vancouver's current tallest building, the Shangri-La building on West Georgia, is 646ft from floor to roof (the second tallest is the Wall Centre at 491ft). The height restrictions were originally created in order to protect 'view corridors'--allowing citizens of Vancouver mostly unobstructed views of the mountains, but as land grows scarce in the downtown core, and density reigns its green head Vancouver might be heading for taller buildings, and this doesn't have to be a bad thing.

There's no doubt that Vancouver's skyline is a beautiful and arresting sight. Traveling over any of the bridges offers some amazing views that mesh ocean, coastline, skyscrapers, and mountains into one sparkling liquid smear (I particularly like view coming over the Burrard bridge as it seems to bisect the city perfectly). But it is a skyline that resembles a buzz-cut, with the notable exception of the Shangri-La building which looms tall above it all, like a blade of grass missed by the lawnmower. It stands alone. For the moment.

Visually arresting city skylines depend on variation in height: Seattle, New York, Dubai, Toronto. In Vancouver, the eyes are immediately drawn upwards past the similar towers towards the mountains; this, of course, was a deliberate planning decision: protect the mountain views. Not a bad idea, but any regulation gone on too long and held too strictly seems to result in a visual monotony. Those images also reveal Vancouver's obsession with glass towers, which although has become the city's trademark, has also quickly gone too far. This is most prominent in Yaletown, an area which has undergone vast and quick condo tower development, leaving the area with the bitter taste of architectural boredom in ones mouth. Skylines need diversity in height and material.

I don't support getting rid of the view corridors, but I do support a case-by-case look at firms that propose buildings over the restricted height limit. They don't have to be a blight on the skyline, but could enhance it, they could--as the Globe and Mail article pointed out--rise and fall like the mountain skyline behind them, become a feature rather than a hindrance. Buildings can be beautiful, too.

I think Vancouver could benefit from taking more risks in the future with the look of the built city, whether that is variation in the types of material used, embracing strange and risky architecture, or altering the skyline with a smattering of tall buildings. If it's done right then we can have an arresting skyline that compliments the mountains behind it, instead of either one overshadowing the other. Architects in Vancouver have a unique hurdle in that the canvas they are painting on is already decorated with artwork, but this should be seen as a challenge by the city, not a reason to build boring buildings.