Seeking beauty, architects find vanity
When the University of Toronto opened its new Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design in late 2017, praise rained down from the skies. A local deep thinker declared it “one of the best Canadian buildings of the past decade.”
Alas, a year later and it’s already revealed as one of the worst.
Circulation is mazelike, space cramped and acoustics so bad normal human communication is impossible. It also happens to be dead ugly. If that weren’t enough, the designers, Boston-based practice NADAAA, clearly put little thought into the relationship between their addition and the dignified 19th-century Gothic heap at 1 Spadina Cres. to which it is connected.
No wonder students dislike their new digs so deeply. Everything about it is off-putting. Their unhappiness reached a crescendo with a damning article that appeared recently in U of T student paper the Varsity. Given the building’s function as a place of learning and an exemplar, its failure goes beyond the usual architectural missteps that abound in this city and others.
Indeed, the Daniels addition is symptomatic of architecture’s growing inability to see beyond itself and contribute to a world in desperate need of more than personal vanity and professional laziness.
Several weeks ago, the city of Stockholm refused permission for Apple to build a retail outlet in the city’s main square. That store, designed by Norman Foster — Lord Foster to us — was exactly what you’d expect — slick, generic and expensivelooking. It was also completely wrong.
One couldn’t help but wonder why Foster would have anything to do with such an offensive proposal. God knows his firm doesn’t need the work. The only possible explanation is that no one in his office bothered to consider the project’s appropriateness and carried on regardless. Just one more in an endless series of jobs, another opportunity to show off the brilliance of the practice.
This disconnection between a profession as important as architecture and the cities in which it operates doesn’t bode well for either. Toronto’s a good example. The city where condos are churned out almost daily, each less sustainable and architecturally defensible than the next, is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. In the rush to serve their masters, architects seem to have lost touch with the knowledge and skills that make their work meaningful.
Consider the project underway on the northwest corner of University Ave. and Dundas St., where Core Architects has buried a modestly optimistic ’60s office tower behind a new facade of steel and glass and, adding insult to injury, plopped a condo tower on top. The result is one of the most ill-conceived Canadian buildings of the last decade.
Even worse, down at Yonge St. and Front St. W., the uniquely urbane Dominion Public Building is about to be disfigured with not one tower but two.
Designed by architectsAlliance, the additions, 45 and 49 storeys, will rise from the ele- gantly curved Beaux Arts beauty like a pair of hideous parasitical growths. To be fair, all we have to go by are renderings, but chances are good the final product will be even more depressing than indicated.
Even Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect who made his name with a series of innovative and attractive residential buildings in Copenhagen, has designed a condo slab on King St. W. that seems more intent on maximizing the number of units than in doing what’s right for the site and the city. Illustrations show a scheme that enthusiastically overwhelms the heritage neighbourhood it occupies. Even the metaphors Ingels uses to describe the complex, which he calls a series of “mountains,” indicates just how out of touch his scheme is.
In the 21st century, this is what cutting edge architecture looks like. Who can forget the late Zaha Hadid’s 2016 Antwerp Port House? It could be a refugee from an Archigram Walking City attempting to mount an entirely innocent former fire station on the water’s edge.
Thanks are due, then, to the Norwegian/American architectural firm, Snohetta, and Canada’s Dialog, for the Calgary New Central Library. The building, which opened two weeks ago, is a powerful, even thrilling reminder that architecture can be an enormously positive force in the life of a city and its residents.
This structure, which puts people before books, incorporates a stretch of the CTrain and connects downtown Calgary with the East Village. No wonder Calgarians embraced the building straight away; it was designed for them, not despite them.