Reckoning with Canada’s true landscape
The Canadian pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale is subtle, tucked in a leafy corner of the park by the lagoon. The 1958 midcentury modern building looks like something you might find in any Canadian national park or even on Toronto Island.
Currently under renovation, Canada’s contribution to this year’s Biennale is called Extraction, exploring not so much architecture as the Earth itself and how we mine it. The Extraction team took advantage of the pavilion closure, constructing a wall in front of it made of bales of aggregate, like you might see at any resource-extraction site. In front of the wall, visitors must kneel and put their face close to the ground to peek through a pinhole to see an underground video monitor.
The film it shows and a corresponding booklet are titled Landscape Manifesto for the Next Century and attempts to reckon with the imperial mining empire Canada has created. Of 20,000 mining projects around the world, they tell us, more than half are Canadian-operated. Canadians exploit the earth like no other.
Toronto can sometimes seem far removed from Canada’s resource economy, but the city, and its everexpanding skyline and condo boom, is directly and indirectly connected to it. We’re all part of it somehow. Check where your mutual funds go.
Though a completely separate project, I wish there had been a way to also stage the proposal by the Toronto architecture firm Partisans called An Iconic Address. The somewhat satirical project would have erected condo scaffolding around the existing pavilion to create a common Canadian landscape: a condo construction site.
“Condominiumization is one of the most predominant forms of construction across Canada and is central to our urban prosperity story,” says Alexander Josephson, a Partisan founder. “To us there was no other subject more important to Canadian architectural speculation.”
Instead, the Partisan team, along with Dutch architecture critic Hans Ibelings, channelled their condo energy into a book called Rise and Sprawl: The Condominiumization of Toronto released in June. I expected to dislike it, as much of the conversation around condos in Toronto is knee-jerk hate, a kind of misanthropy against new people, rarely getting to more important issues of design and affordability. Substitute the word “people” for “condo,” as a test, and see how some of the haters sound then.
Rise and Sprawl is not that kind of book and digs deep into both condo form and economy. Josephson says the density they bring has enlivened Toronto’s streets with humans like never before. He accepts that condos are an important form of development if we’re to keep Toronto open to newcomers; there are no Trump-style walls around our city for now.
Like their Biennale proposal, the book pokes fun at condos sometimes, with an entire section dedicated to the often-ridiculous marketing slogans, such as: “Totally awesome. Totally Different”; “Raw Organic Unscripted”; or for the most hubristically named condo of all, Yonge + Rich, “Yonge at Heart. Rich in Possibilities.” Sometimes I wonder if the marketers, not the architects or developers, generate much of the disdain themselves.
For Josephson, Rise and Sprawl is a critique of the forces responsible for the lack of romance and diversity in condos: markets, developers, architects and planning. The book also lays out the main players in Toronto, a few dozen developers and architects, and includes a typology of the condos we see on the street, a kind of Ikea catalogue of similarity.
Because condos are often so poorly designed, giving little back to the city’s urbanity, each one is greeted with push back from residents already here. “Toronto is replete with processes that empower NIMBYism, it is a negative force and prevents positive steps forward in development and density,” say Josephson. “NIMBYism prevents special voices and progressives from making steps forward.”
The book doesn’t solve the looming affordability question, an issue cities everywhere are dealing with. But it’s a refreshing view on contemporary Toronto that embraces our condo reality and is another manifesto, like Extraction, that recognizes the reality of Canada’s landscape. These are all important conversations to keep having.
After Venice, Extraction will tour Canada throughout 2017. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef