[URBAN NOTE] Architecture and Modernity
Sep. 17th, 2004 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldTuesday, I wrote about the subway. I took the subway south from Eglinton again today, after I left work at 5 o'clock, and was able to position myself at the front of the subway cars.
I like train rides, in part because of the ability they afford car-less me to see the scenery of the natural world. The stretch of Ontarian countryside between the Québec border and the Greater Toronto Area sprawl, hugging the Canadian Shield and so (to my Island-born eyes) hilly and rocky and hemmed-in by forest, covered by late summer grasses or by the slush and snow and general damp of the winter season, is something I'd never have seen without the train. In the subway tunnels, though, there's another kind of experience entirely, as the train barrels down the dim concrete tunnel lits at regular intervals by coloured lights, with the slivers of light that are the earliest signs of the stations which balloon into miniature universes in seconds.
The subways--of Toronto specifically, and of the world generally--might well be the most popular remnants of architectural modernism in the world, or at least the most frequently used. Simply designed, powerful, eminently usable. Toronto's subways, though, are beginning to show wear and tear, the dating of their stations' 1960s design and the physical damage to their tiles. Modernity, in all of its forms, needs constant investment.
Belle Waring's September 11th posting on Crooked Timber, in part a memorialization of the World Trade Center and its impact on the inimitable and completely modern landscape of Manhattan and New York City (expressed in its presence as in its absence), struck me at the time. When I was younger, an adolescent, I detailed endless city skylines in drawings made both electronically and on paper, and I was pleased when I was able to buy three framed pictures of the Manhattan skyline at night. (One of my strongest memories of September 11th is watching the collapse of one of the towers on CNN, going into my bedroom, and realizing that two of these pictures were now out of date.)
One element of her essay that resonated particularly with me was Belle's fear that, had she ever visited the Twin Towers, she might have jumped from the World Trade Center, caught up on an inverse of the rapture of the deeps. I think that I feel the same way--when I first visited the CN Tower two years ago, I felt a bit of that fear, a quiet relaxation felt when I saw the wire mesh between me and Toronto, down, down. Only a bit: I was able to content myself and those urges by jumping up and down on the glass floor. I get the same kind of rush.
Modernity, in its various forms, is the outcome of an immensely long process, of vast amounts of energy made to work and stored. Modernity is not so much power as it is a method of storing power. Modernity--capitalistic, democratic, pluralistic--allows people to get unimaginably close to power. We must all be careful, of course, that we don't get too close.
I like train rides, in part because of the ability they afford car-less me to see the scenery of the natural world. The stretch of Ontarian countryside between the Québec border and the Greater Toronto Area sprawl, hugging the Canadian Shield and so (to my Island-born eyes) hilly and rocky and hemmed-in by forest, covered by late summer grasses or by the slush and snow and general damp of the winter season, is something I'd never have seen without the train. In the subway tunnels, though, there's another kind of experience entirely, as the train barrels down the dim concrete tunnel lits at regular intervals by coloured lights, with the slivers of light that are the earliest signs of the stations which balloon into miniature universes in seconds.
The subways--of Toronto specifically, and of the world generally--might well be the most popular remnants of architectural modernism in the world, or at least the most frequently used. Simply designed, powerful, eminently usable. Toronto's subways, though, are beginning to show wear and tear, the dating of their stations' 1960s design and the physical damage to their tiles. Modernity, in all of its forms, needs constant investment.
Belle Waring's September 11th posting on Crooked Timber, in part a memorialization of the World Trade Center and its impact on the inimitable and completely modern landscape of Manhattan and New York City (expressed in its presence as in its absence), struck me at the time. When I was younger, an adolescent, I detailed endless city skylines in drawings made both electronically and on paper, and I was pleased when I was able to buy three framed pictures of the Manhattan skyline at night. (One of my strongest memories of September 11th is watching the collapse of one of the towers on CNN, going into my bedroom, and realizing that two of these pictures were now out of date.)
One element of her essay that resonated particularly with me was Belle's fear that, had she ever visited the Twin Towers, she might have jumped from the World Trade Center, caught up on an inverse of the rapture of the deeps. I think that I feel the same way--when I first visited the CN Tower two years ago, I felt a bit of that fear, a quiet relaxation felt when I saw the wire mesh between me and Toronto, down, down. Only a bit: I was able to content myself and those urges by jumping up and down on the glass floor. I get the same kind of rush.
Modernity, in its various forms, is the outcome of an immensely long process, of vast amounts of energy made to work and stored. Modernity is not so much power as it is a method of storing power. Modernity--capitalistic, democratic, pluralistic--allows people to get unimaginably close to power. We must all be careful, of course, that we don't get too close.
