[URBAN NOTE] "The difficult task of reviving Toronto’s Ontario Place"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Alex Bozikovic writes about the issues involved with reviving Ontario Place. Why, for starters?

The couple looked as confused as we were: He in a navy-blue two-piece and she in a red skirt suit, while our crowd donned skinny jeans, canvas totes and New Balance. As we all arrived at Ontario Place, it became clear we were here for different purposes: us for the In/Future festival of arts and music, and them for a wedding.

In the modernist fantasy land on Toronto’s waterfront, which opened in 1971, the wedding guests seemed a bit out of place. Ontario Place was designed as a gleaming showpiece for the province’s culture, but that vision collapsed; today the site, which ended up as a theme park, is largely closed. The wedding venue, meanwhile, is doing good business.

Ontario Place was the product of grand modernist dream, built on a futurist ambition of social progress.

It was a powerful lesson about what makes public space work: You have to give people a reason to come. And In/Future, which wrapped up last weekend after a highly successful 10-day run, did just that: a set of art installations and music performances that brought one of Ontario Place’s two artificial islands to life.

And that is a difficult task: How do you take a big and slightly isolated place, the product of a grand modernist dream, and make it live again?

The curators of In/Future, Rui Pimenta and Layne Hinton, asked artists to engage with the landscape – designed by Michael Hough as a rolling park stocked with native trees and shrubs – and with the architecture, envisioned by Eberhard Zeidler, with its spherical cinema and series of high-tech white steel structures. “What do we learn about ourselves in the present,” Hinton asks, “when we look at the past, to see how we imagined the future?”