Across the ponds

Proxy Agency

I went with Kirk on a short jaunt across the ponds over the weekend to Toronto; he was there to give a talk at York University while the main attraction for me was the chance to visit with Bob and Claudine, friends from the Berkeley era I haven't seen for 10 or more years. True to the soul of an urbanite, they reside close to downtown Toronto, in an area called Cabbagetown, with a cat named Hector whom they rescued (with the owner's consent), from been woefully cooped up at a neighbor's attic. 

Out to pasture

I managed to pack in quite a few sight-seeing activities for our short stay.  Here are some of the highlights.  Taking advantage on our central location, soon after we arrived, Bob and Claudine took us on a quick walk around the Financial District.  At the heart of it is the Toronto-Dominion Center which comprises a group of six towers, connected on the ground by an open plaza and green space, by Mies van der Rohe, with their facades marked by Mies's inimitable, evenly spaced, soaring, slender, steel mullions painted in black.  These stark-looking buildings are somewhat mollified by a group of resting cow sculptures calmly taking in the hustle and bustle of the life around it.  

Allen Lambert Galleria

a conditioned urban alley

We next came upon the Allen Lambert Galleria, by Santiago Calatrava, a light-filled insertion into the interstitial spaces in the tightly built urban fabric.  It joins a diverse group of existing buildings under a canopy created by a series of parabolic steel arches and glass.  It reminds me of the Galleria in Milan and is among the various iterations of the glazed arcade typology made possible by the invention of cast                                             iron and plate glass.

As is my wont whenever I'm on a short visit to a new city, I booked in advance a guided architectural walk, this time, the Art and Performance Tour in the Entertainment District of Toronto.  And as is my usual good fortune, I managed to meet up with a knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteer architecture buff, and as we happened to be the only two visitors for the tour on that Saturday morning, we got all his attention.  Of the many buildings we stopped by, two stood out - The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and the nearby Sharp Center for Design.  You can see the two buildings in a short video by an architecture critic, Christopher Hume, at the Toronto Star.

A disappearing act

Exuberant curve

Bent wood armature

Bent wood spiral staircase

The most recent expansion of AGO is a rare, self-effacing work by Frank Gehry, a native son, where his own claim to respect a building's context (for once) rings true.  The Concept was exemplified by the building's very dissimilar facades--a curving, billowing glass screen over a bent-wood armature along Dundas Street and a flat, glass and titanium screen painted in blue, with a surreal exterior spiral staircase rising in midair, facing the Grange Park, behind the historic Grange House.  The idea, we were told, was to paint the facade in blue, which at certain moments can seem to merge with the sky, so as not to overpower its smaller neighbor, the stately historic mansion, and the adjacent park grounds.

Gratitude for a leg up

Tabletop

To the right of the park, rises the lively white "tabletop", clad in corrugated aluminum with random "pixellated" black squares and rectangles, sitting on roughly 85-ft tall, colorful, hollow steel legs, hovering above existing buildings on the OCAD campus.  It houses two levels of studio and teaching spaces; its elevated position enabled the architect (Will Alsop) to create the new facility without having to demolish the existing buildings on the site.  

The Crystal

hard to be missed

We continued on our architectural exploration of Toronto further north along University Avenue, passing Queen's Park, to the edge of Bloor Street. There are several notable buildings along this stretch of commercial and university property, but the one which screams out the loudest for attention is the so-called Crystal Addition to the Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind.  Its aggressive and over-the-top presence on the streetscape has gotten some bad rap, with a few exceptions, from some critics and the public but, from what I could see, it seems to have achieved the purpose of engaging and animating the street life and drawing the public into its otherwise heavy, neo-Romanesque building from the early 20th Century.  

Canada seems to have sidestepped the banking crisis (due to the conservative lending practice of their venerable banking institutions, according to our guide), and bucked the global trend of economic recession.  According to an article in the Toronto Star, Toronto has been experiencing unprecedented growth in construction, especially in mixed-use, commercial/residential towers, and there were more towers (132) under construction last year in Toronto than any other city on earth, with even more this year.  My overall impression of the architectural scene in Toronto, at least in the downtown area, is that they have a hodgepodge of old and new buildings but do not have a coherent story to tell or a prominent skyline to speak of.  With due respect, Toronto, though in close geographic and cultural proximity to New York State, is no New York City.  No wonder Claudine bemoaned the loss of her beloved NYC when she first moved there.  

We had a couple of curious cultural experiences passing through Toronto Pearson International Airport.  On the way in, we were sent to the Immigration area because of the suspicion that Kirk might be engaging in some covert business consultation as he was to be compensated for giving a "colloquium" ("what is that?", the Immigration Officer asked) at York University.  On the way out, I had an unpleasant exchange with a Canadian Airline agent when I asked her how to get to the Customs area.  (For flights to the U.S. one has to clear US Customs in Toronto.)  She answered me with such thinly veiled contempt that it took my breath away.  I'm not sure whether her sense of superiority was directed to me as a US Citizen or as a person of Asian descent.