LETTER PERFECT
Is there a way to soften the blow of all those supermailboxes Canada Post plans to install when it phases out home delivery?
Four designers show Canada Post how the new supermailboxes should have looked,
Here’s an idea: What if a thing you had to deal with every day — a practical, matter-of-course interaction, part of the streetscape, ingrained in your life — was seen as an opportunity for something beautiful?
That’s the first question we asked when we looked at Canada Post’s plan to phase out home delivery and install thousands of its new supermailboxes across the country over the next five years. Beautiful they’re not. Not even close. These utilitarian eyesores aren’t the whole problem, of course: 226,000 Canadians (and counting) have expressed their dismay at the end of home delivery by signing a petition against it; the city of Hamilton registered its with a lawsuit against the Crown corporation; and Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre personally jackhammered the concrete base of a partly constructed supermailbox site. But wouldn’t something with a little design sense, a bit of élan, be an easier sell?
What if we could soften the blow by offering them something iconic — something beautiful, something emblematic that would stand for generations — instead of a blunt metal box?
If this were Denmark, or Sweden, or Japan, a national design competition would be a matter of course. The mailbox’s ubiquity and daily use would be interpreted as a chance to craft something that stood up as an emblem of the nation’s design culture, not merely pragmatic, but significant and sensitive to not only the country’s needs but its desires.
The cruel fact of opportunity is that it can be hard to recognize when it first appears but becomes brutally obvious once it’s missed. Which brings us to this project.
We’ve asked four Toronto designers to do better. Each of them has. Lead by Partisans Projects, the groundbreaking architecture firm responsible for Bar Raval’s swooping mahogany curves and the forthcoming redux of Union Station’s retail concourse, better starts right now.
We asked designers to create icons that turned supermailboxes into objects of pride and wonder. The Toronto architecture firm Partisans Projects made big waves in the design world this year with its scheme for Bar Raval, a College St. hot spot with swooping, Gaudi-esque organic curves carved from rich mahogany. They’ve also been tasked with reimagining Union Station’s retail concourse, a project with huge civic impact that gets at the heart of the firm’s practice: a passion for the public sphere with a more-than-modest activist bent.