It’s a bad time to be modernist
Back in the 1960s, when the future was still something people looked forward to, architects never missed a chance to celebrate the Brave New World that lurked just round the corner.
Their buildings soared, twisted and turned transparent as they explored the endless possibilities of tomorrow.
Nearly half a century later, that future has come true. The dream morphed into a nightmare and its architecture now finds itself unwanted, unloved and in the way. So it’s little wonder that North York Community Council voted yesterday against granting additional heritage status to the former Bata Shoe Company headquarters in Don Mills. The decision opens the door for the current owners, the Aga Khan Foundation Canada, which wants to build an Ismaili spiritual centre on the site.
Designed in the mid-’ 60s by John B. Parkin, the building is the latest in a series of modernist landmarks threatened with demolition. Though few tears will be shed for Parkin’s structure, the city will be diminished by its destruction. No matter how worthy its successor, the building deserves to be saved. No one disagrees that the construction of an Ismaili cultural complex would be a wonderful asset for Toronto, but the loss of this mid- 20th- century icon — a suburban icon to boot — does nobody any good. For Parkin, one of a small group of architects who dragged Toronto into the modern age, the Bata building was a masterpiece of sorts. Situated on a height of land in Toronto’s north end, the simple, modular edifice exemplifies the ideal of the building in a park. Simple and seemingly weightless, it rests on rows of columns, reminiscent of an ancient Greek temple. Unadorned yet poetic, the architecture pays homage to the past while extolling the virtues of the future.
Sadly, the revolution ushered in by Parkin and his brothersinarms didn’t work out as planned. The geometry of modernism, though clean and crisp, grew rigid and repetitive. Forty years later, what looked new and novel in 1964 now just seems boring and predictable. But wait another four decades, and these same buildings will start to appear interesting and historical. There will be no question about designation, just as there isn’t now when some 19th- century Gothic heap comes up for consideration. The fact is we’d rather save a second-rate Victorian warehouse than a first- rate modernist office building.
After Bata, the city will have to decide the fate of another ’ 60s monument, the Hummingbird Centre.
This one, designed by the other great Toronto architect of the time, Peter Dickinson, may become a base for a condo tower. We’ll soon see. The irony is that if ever there was a time when Toronto — indeed, Canada — was universally considered cool, it was the ’ 60s. Unencumbered by the past, it was the promised land. Buildings like Bata, Terminal One at Pearson airport (now demolished), the Sun Life building on University Ave., and the former Ontario Association of Architecture headquarters, on Park Rd. in Rosedale, also by Parkin, were seen as a sign of our growing sophistication. That didn’t turn out, either. Somewhere along the way, we decided history, even our own, isn’t worth saving. What kind of a future is that? Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca