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Alsop, Gehry, Libeskind, Diamond, Kuwabara and Honest Ed: Toronto's cultural buildings renaissance gathers pace. Whatever happened to Canadian understatement?

Text and OCAD pictures © Hugh Pearman. First published on Gabion.

People are friendly in Toronto. They talk to you spontaneously in the street. "Interesting place, huh?" is a typical opening gambit when I am caught pointing my camera at Will Alsop's new Walking-City extension to the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). Policemen and women on bicycles stop to chat. Streetcar drivers talk as they go. Even the beggars, of whom there are many, are strangely unthreatening to anyone hardened in the streets of European or American cities. They are all anxious to know: what do I think?

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Seite 1 von 2Gabion: Alsop, Gehry, Libeskind, Diamond, Kuwabara and Honest Ed: Toronto's cultural buildings ...

13.12.2007http://www.hughpearman.com/articles5/toronto.html


Well, what I think is that Toronto is trying very hard to reinvent itself as a city of culture. That much is obvious. Alsop's OCAD building, an Op-Art composition perched high above the existing collegebuildings on colourful angled stilts, is just the first expression of a state-sponsored programme known as "Superbuild" in which this lakeshore city is making up for over a decade of neglect of its cultural patrimony - a neglect that was starting to show up on its balance sheet as tourist numbers began to drop.

So after Alsop you have these projects coming along, all big: the new home for the Canadian Opera Company (the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts) by Jack Diamond of Diamond and Schmitt Architects: a substantial reworking of the Art Gallery of Toronto by Frank Gehry; a similarly fundamental

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13.12.2007http://www.hughpearman.com/articles5/toronto2.html

makeover of the Royal Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind; and the first ever permanent building for the celebrated Toronto International Film Festival, by Bruce Kuwabara of architects KPMB. There are other, smaller projects for dance and music venues and smaller museums.

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In the education field, there is not just OCAD: at the University of Toronto, Behnisch & Behnisch andNorman Foster are building science faculties side by side. Foster's, coincidentally, will also be a box on(glazed-in) stilts while part of Gehry's reworking of the art museum will consists of a box perched high -in his case, a direct and acknowledged response to Alsop's nearby OCAD. Diamond's opera house andLibeskind's museum are well under way already, with Gehry's gallery and Kuwabara's film house yet tostart.

This is a lot of building to happen in a short time, which means that there is a frantic fund-raising operation under way. Although the state has been dishing out the dollars, the majority of the money hasto be raised privately. Fortunately the massive $4.4 billion, 10-year rebuilding of Toronto's Lester B. Pearson International Airport by S.O.M, Adamson and Safdie, which has tied up much of theconstruction capability of Ontario for some years, has reached a pause point with the opening of thenew Terminal One, releasing desperately-needed construction workers back into the city centre.

(Historical note: the airport is named for Lester Bowles Pearson, a former Canadian diplomat, primeminister and Nobel Peace Prize winner who was active in the United Nations and is credited by somefor defusing the Suez Crisis of 1956. He also introduced the Canadian flag and the notion ofEnglish/French biculturalism.)

Alsop, never one to undersell himself, describes OCAD as his "best building yet". He's probably right in one sense, since this is the purest example I have yet seen of an Alsop diagram built. Usually there are more compromises than this on the long road from concept to reality. In this case - though there were the usual budget-trimmings that mostly affected the finishing materials - the concept remains intact. OCAD had a patch of land alongside its buildings that it had earmarked for the extension. Alsop waved that aside, gave it over to an extension of the public park that lies behind the building, and instead placed his extension way up in the air, hovering above the existing buildings, high enough to allow people in the condominiums opposite to see underneath it. An elevator core gives access: you might assume that the red sloping piece leading into the building's underbelly is an escalator housing, but it turns out to be merely an escape stair.



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This is the disappointment of OCAD: inside it is so much less interesting than you might imagine. There is no dramatic sense of arrival up high - it's just like arriving by lift anywhere. The two floors in thatpixilated tabletop are carved up into cellular spaces - a college requirement, diametrically opposed to Alsop's own preference for something more akin to a giant open-plan creative playpen. So there is no great internal view. The structure intrudes at intervals, but not in a way that is particularly celebrated, though you can see the girders radiating out from the column heads here and there. There was a lot of post 9/11 belt-and-braces safety engineering, and you can see and feel the aesthetic consequencesinternally. Alsop's deep window bays, however, making use of the depth of all that beefy structure, are great places to sit and contemplate, just as he intended.




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It is, as he happily admits, a rough-and-ready sort of place inside. After all, it's an art college. It needs tobe able to take a good kicking, and you'd be disappointed if the students didn't rise to the occasion. However, its importance in Toronto is nothing to do with its function. It represents an aesthetic rupture with the tradition of this rational, grid-planned, block-and-tower city where the needle of the CN Tower represents a rare excursion into look-at-me urban histrionics. What Jack Diamond calls "the genius of Toronto" is to do with the civilized whole, not the mostly absent iconographic parts. This is, after all, the adopted city of that champion of true urbanity, Jane Jacobs.

Bruce Kuwabara, a Torontonian to the core, is also evangelistic about the enlightened polycentric nature of his city with its precise hierarchy of streets, and his proposed film centre with its inhabited roofscape is intelligently calculated to fit into that tradition. Kuwabara is too polite and perhaps too young to offer comment on the work of the latest celebrated incomers, but Diamond, as a hardened and highly successful international veteran, has no such scruples. Diamond does not like the signature-buildings approach here, and tells you as much. He has designed his opera house to be an opera


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house, not to be a giant piece of sculpture. Both Diamond and Kuwabara have therefore designed Torontonian buildings - more transparent, more outward-looking than many of their predecessors, but not the sort of buildings that would automatically be flashed as iconic images around the world. They are more modest than that.



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The controversy that has attended the latest crop of building designs tells you that Diamond is not alone in his views. Gehry has had a particularly rough ride over his plans for the art gallery. Which is tough in a way, since Toronto is his city of birth and upbringing. He played in the park out the back as a kid. The gallery was where he first gained an appreciation of art. Perhaps as a result of this, his designs are more muted than you might expect from Gehry. There are no histrionics, no Bilbao moments. He unifies the currently piecemeal façade with a long, low visor in timber and glass. He re-orders the interior - in the process undoing some comparatively recent work by Barton Myers - and places that box high on the back, conducting its conversation with Alsop. The design process continues: even as I was there, fresh drawings were coming in.

Over at the Royal Ontario Museum - an example of the 18th century example of the "universal museum" containing a little bit of everything - they are hard at work building Libeskind's "Crystal" courtyard extension, which replaces a previous, non-crystalline courtyard extension. Seeing this, the bosses of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London should weep, for here Libeskind is doing much the same thing as he did in his "Spiral" designs for the V&A extension so many years ago, which still remain unbuilt. London could have been first: instead, if it is built at all, it will be just one of many museums with a Libeskind addition, and these later ones are more fluent.

Alsop is welcome in Toronto, in my view: he is not yet quite the international architectural Band-Aid that Gehry and Libeskind have become. Alsop still challenges assumptions and is capable of springing

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surprises. OCAD makes you smile rather as Alsop himself does: this is a building with charm. Diamond, for his part, has an older-generation notion of professionalism that serves him well: he is still a greatcompetition-winner. And I'm pleased to have met Kuwabara, who is an architect to watch.



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As for Toronto itself, with its multifarious, multi-ethnic neighbourhoods - for me its character is summed up by two districts. One is the leafy, tasteful late 19th century residential quarter in the east known as Cabbagetown after its original Irish residents who grew vegetables in their front gardens. The other is "Honest Ed" Mirvish's brash, gargantuan discount store village, out east next to the Korean quarter. Where else in the world do you find a dime store cluttered with historic theatrical posters, photographs and props? They are from Mirvish's other life as a stage entrepreneur. No need to import the expensive iconography: at Honest Ed's, it comes ready-made. You can buy it and still have change.



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