The cost of a city valuing price above all else

Toronto is becoming a bargain basement of a community — not the best it could be, but happy to be the cheapest

A chair is a chair is a chair. Except, of course, that it isn’t. Still, when Mayor Rob Ford blew a fuse last week after the city spent $75,000 on 30 chairs, many assumed, as did His Worship, that it was another egregious example of the gravy train rolling through town with the civic bureaucracy aboard.

But before we all jump to conclusions about the money-is-no-object attitude of official Toronto, perhaps it’s worth putting the matter in perspective.

To begin with, it’s important to understand that although the price of chairs was the source of mayoral outrage, the real issue was the cultural heritage and integrity of city hall. Yes, cheaper chairs could have been bought, however, that wasn’t the point of the exercise.

Ford would have preferred we buy furniture from Walmart, but this purchase was clearly made out of respect for the city and the building that serves as its headquarters and a symbol of Toronto.

That’s why city hall was the subject of an international design competition launched in the late 1950s, one that attracted more than 400 submissions from around the world.

The intention was to make a statement, to announce that Toronto was no longer a dingy colonial outpost but a modern metropolis willing and able to play a role on the global stage. The winning design, by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, was bold, dynamic and thoroughly contemporary. To this day, it remains one of the most remarkable and admired city halls on the planet.

If the sort of thinking that prevails now in Toronto had prevailed then, it would never have been built. The Rob Fords of the day would have railed about the usual things — cost and the bottom line. The project would have been dismissed out of hand.

Indeed, the competition, which itself changed the way Torontonians see themselves and their city, would never have been held. How much easier would it have been simply to hire the cheapest architect around and construct the cheapest building?

But no; for once that wasn’t enough. For once in its history, Toronto decided to do something extraordinary.

Its importance wasn’t simply architectural. City hall’s real significance was civic. The building was recognition of how architecture — i.e. culture — can affect a city’s relationship with itself and the world.

Today, Revell’s masterpiece is the acknowledged heart of the city. It is where we ring in the new year, where we gather to demonstrate, celebrate or just eat lunch. It is charged with a meaning possessed by no other building or square in Toronto. Naturally, when the time came to replace a room full of vintage chairs, some unlucky employee — one no longer with the city — would have assumed his or her job went beyond the provision of mere seating. He or she would have seen the task as having more to do with remaining true to the spirit of the place and its creators’ decisions, both architectural and symbolic. How foolish! In 2013, Toronto has become a city that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Though understandable, perhaps, this slow descent into civic banality will ultimately lead us to more of the same. Maybe the chairs could have been replaced for less, but that’s a different question.

The more pressing concern is that we have turned into a community that cheers on a mayor whose lack of understanding about what matters and why has already left the city degraded, demoralized and disgraced. If the only thing that counts is cost, Toronto is well on its way to becoming a bargain basement of a city, a civic discount outlet, not the best it could be, but happy to be the cheapest. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca