A Bit More Detail

• Jamie Bradburn was decidedly unimpressed by the Neon Museum at Junction House.


• Renovictions are a real concern for many renters in Toronto, already living on the edges of their budgets. CBC reports.


• Urban Toronto notes an interesting consolidation of two development plans into one at Yonge and Eglinton, here.


• blogTO notes how the Royal Ontario Museum is now going to offer free admission every third Monday of the month.


• Natalia Manzocco writes at NOW Toronto about how the Room With A View pop-up restaurant underneath the Gardiner Expressway ended up triggering city concerns over housing.

• The murder of two young people and wounding of more than a dozen in a shooting on the Danforth is shocking. CBC reports.


• CBC reports on a timely new exhibition at the ROM, #MeToo & The Arts.


• Samantha Edwards at NOW Toronto notes how plans to transform the old Fairland grocery store on Augusta into a big nightclub threatens the nature of Kensington Market.


• blogTO notes that the mist gardens of the Four Seasons Toronto on Yorkville Avenue are open to the public and free.


• The new City of Toronto program HomeShare, getting older residents to rent out unused rooms to younger tenants (often students), is one creative response to the crises of affordable housing and aging. The Toronto Star reports.

• Spacing's Chris Bateman has an amusing piece about Toronto's first experiments with computer dating, in 1957.


• Edward Keenan makes the case that Toronto should prepare for the consequences of the housing market finally tanking, over at the Toronto Star.


• blogTO notes an impressive design for a new multi-function community centre down at Canoe Landing.


• Michelle Da Silva describes, at NOW Toronto, what looks like a spectacular exhibit of the works of Christian Dior at the ROM.

The Crystal is flawed. The Royal Ontario Museum doesn’t want to put it that way, but that is the message of what it calls the “Welcome Project”: Its architectural transformation of a decade ago, which was meant to revive the Toronto institution, doesn’t work as it should.

That message was hidden in a piece of news this week from Canada’s most-visited museum. It plans to reopen the entrance in its 1932 wing, add a new ramp and broader stair, and reconfigure the rotunda inside as a lobby once again.

A small step, but it’s an appetizer for larger plans that include new plazas, an outdoor amphitheatre and renovations to the current lobby.

It’s good news for residents and visitors to Toronto: The region’s most popular and most democratic museum will be a more pleasant place to visit.

And it reflects a new focus for architecture in institutions such as this: not in making showpieces, but on the nuts and bolts of making places that work.

Coupland is best known for his iconic novels like Generation X (1991), which coined the term that defined 1990s youth culture, but before all that he started off as a formally trained visual artist and designer. Taking place at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the pop art–inspired whimsical exhibition everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything is where his work as a novelist and visual artist clearly intersect.

In one section we are shown his novels Girlfriend in a Coma and Generation X—only, Coupland has lovingly chewed them up into pulpy hornets’ nests. The nests were so convincingly crafted, they were hard to tell apart from the real nests he left atop the display.

Then there’s a section called “The Brain” that takes up a large chunk of the exhibition, which displays various knickknacks collected over a decade and divided into three hemispheres that hint at the brain’s bilateral symmetry. The piece itself is remarkable, made up of thousands of objects, including street signs and miniature kitchen furniture, all representing different experiences in the artist’s life—from being born on a Canadian military base in West Germany to growing up in middle-class Vancouver.

Spending a few minutes in the exhibit, you quickly realize why its title is so broad—Coupland’s work is anything and everything. It’s also for anyone, with many pieces appealing to the general audiences. This feels a bit too safe, but the exhibit’s accessibility makes sense: Coupland’s status as a national treasure is something that couldn’t have been achieved without catering to a wide audience. In a culture of hot takes and unpopular opinions, his pieces feel somewhat refreshing; Coupland isn’t trying to be the first to make a statement, but instead focuses on interpreting major 21st-century events. This message was amplified by paintings about 9/11 that were created so to only be properly seen through the lens of a smartphone camera (which didn’t exist in 2001).