[URBAN NOTE] The TTC fading into night
Oct. 10th, 2005 12:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI ride the TTC's subways, buses, and streetcars on a regular basis, but I haven't travelled on the Yonge-University-Spadina line north of Dupont since I broke up with my now-ex. At that time, I certainly wasn't thinking about the subway station's architecture. I had that leisure last night.
Last year I called subways perhaps the last popular enclave of architectural modernism, managed to handle dense and continuous flows of human and mechanical traffic in the heart of the living city, streamlined and cunningly designed. That's not true on the stations I passed through--Lawrence West, Glencairn, Eglinton West, St. Clair West, even Dupont. The subway line surfaces for long stretches on this length of track, becoming a rapid-transit train of sorts, no longer a fully urban machine.
The stations it feeds are all open. They are paragons of the sort of post-modernist architecture that I first remember seeing on Sesame Street, populated by enthusiastic young children being led through the cavernous halls to their exciting destinations, experiencing for themselves the dominant styles of public architecture in 1978. Dupont, I like, for it is an enclosed space, brightly coloured busy on the pattern of the Montréal metro stations I remember and--if having cavernous halls and being just a bit twitch-inducing at night--friendly. The stations to its north, though, are open at either end to the cold winter winds that pushes over their wide central platforms and the not-low-enough tracks. They're the future.
Last year I called subways perhaps the last popular enclave of architectural modernism, managed to handle dense and continuous flows of human and mechanical traffic in the heart of the living city, streamlined and cunningly designed. That's not true on the stations I passed through--Lawrence West, Glencairn, Eglinton West, St. Clair West, even Dupont. The subway line surfaces for long stretches on this length of track, becoming a rapid-transit train of sorts, no longer a fully urban machine.
The stations it feeds are all open. They are paragons of the sort of post-modernist architecture that I first remember seeing on Sesame Street, populated by enthusiastic young children being led through the cavernous halls to their exciting destinations, experiencing for themselves the dominant styles of public architecture in 1978. Dupont, I like, for it is an enclosed space, brightly coloured busy on the pattern of the Montréal metro stations I remember and--if having cavernous halls and being just a bit twitch-inducing at night--friendly. The stations to its north, though, are open at either end to the cold winter winds that pushes over their wide central platforms and the not-low-enough tracks. They're the future.
