[LINK] "Toronto's new-old is the new beautiful"

[rfmcdonald]

At Spacing Toronto, Shawn Micallef's blog post and linked eye article argues that Toronto's mixture of old and new buildings, often immediately adjoining each other, lends the city a particular creative charm.

Toronto is not a period piece, like some pristine European cities are, and we are fortunate for that. Toronto is always changing (an urban workshop more than a museum) and always has been. New things are being added all the time, making this an exciting place to live, unlike, say, the morgue of a city that Paris has become. When was the last time you heard about an interesting building or contemporary art scene that’s come out of Paris? Our lack of cohesive architectural look — what snobs might refer to as “ugly” — means this city is tabula rasa, a blank slate waiting for us to do stuff in it without too much historical burden to smother the new, allowing cultural ferment of all kinds to happen.

While the Royal Ontario Museum crystal may have various faults that can and will be argued about, the oft-heard opinion that it ruins the classical design of the original building is deserving of a challenge. If any building in this city audaciously embodies what Toronto truly is, it’s the ROM. The same new-old combination has worked next door at the Royal Conservatory of Music and across town at the National Ballet School on Jarvis and at many other locations.

Yet when new and old come together in less high-profile locations, it’s not an easy concept for Torontonians to reconcile. The internalized image of this city — at least for a large chunk of the politically active downtownish crowd — is of a low-rise, pre–World War One city. That causes problems, because much of Toronto is distinctly not that. Our notorious fear of skyscraper height seems like an invented untruth as the view from a plane’s window flying in reveals a forest of high-rises spreading to all civic borders, the most in North America after New York City.

This makes a certain amount of sense. Toronto is a diverse city, and this diversity extends to its architecture. More, bricolage is arguably one of the dominant themes of our late modern times. What think you?