One, how fitting that the one ugly tower in the 1995 pic is the aptly named Canada Square, the first of so many ugly towers to come. We Canucks — or at least we Torontonians, who often forget the rest of the country exists, because we’re so obsessed with trying to be New York we even parrot their snobbish faults — have gone all-in on cheap disposable glass-and-concrete phalluses (phalli?) in the sky.
Two, I’m reminded of the rivalry between beautiful, charming (but much smaller and much less economically powerful) Montreal and brash, tawdry Toronto. Acclaimed director Denis Villeneuve, a French-Canadian Montrealer, recently made a dark psychological film that was set here in Toronto, with Isabella Rossellini and Jake Gyllenhaal. It was called Enemy. He shot Toronto’s abundance of condo skyscrapers to make them look as absolutely monstrous and dystopian as possible, which I interpreted to be a very Montréalais dig at our disposable architecture.
That film, Enemy, has an astonishing end-credits sequence, that just sweeps over Toronto’s skyline in all its late-capitalist “glory”; it’s such a delicious and well-deserved insult to my beloved city. (Despite all its faults, my heart still belongs to Toronto.)
Here it is on YouTube, starting around the 1:30 mark. (Before that mark, arachnophobes beware.)
Seattle too is being loaded down with gigantic towers at great speed, but fortunately there’s no Christopher Wren gem in the foreground to make it all look cheap and nasty.
Right?! It just goes and goes and goes. There’s no end in sight to the condos. Toronto has been the largest construction site outside China for several years now. I’m sure Seattle and Vancouver are in almost the same predicament. It never ends.
I’m so fortunate to be situated both in the dead-centre of downtown and right at the edge of a valley, which means down on street level it’s concrete and crowds and wailing cop cars and honking taxis, but up here my view is a serene panorama of trees and open sky. Problem is there’s this TEENSY sliver of land between me and the valley. A few little houses awkwardly stranded on a little island by the busy streets that trace the valley’s rim. Far too small a plot of land for a condo tower — or so I thought: the real estate market’s so damned hot now they’ve decided to turn that little sliver into a 50-storey luxury hotel, which will completely obliterate my view.
For now I can stand naked at the window and marvel at the valley below and the hawks above, but in a couple years I’ll have no privacy because 50 feet in front of my balcony will be a wall of rich bankers on business trips. Boooooooo!
Oh CRAP. No privacy and no view. That is the pits. I have a view – a hefty slice of Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains beyond. I couldn’t possibly afford it on the market but it’s a minuscule rent in exchange for dog-care for rich people who travel a lot. Best gig I ever found. I’d slaughter a whole row of bankers to keep it.
Hahahaha seriously. He’s the best dog in the world and I have to take him in his humans’ car to parks all over the city for long fun walks. Ayn Rand would be livid.
Well we do need densification… there’s got to be an acceptable and sustainable way to arrange all the humans along with their workplaces and necessities and amenities, but damned if I know what it is.
In a perfect world, a modest depopulation over a couple of generations is the only alternative to expensive anthills on the most desirable real estate.
that won’t happen of course, for the same reason that many of these towers are likely to be overwhelmed by the rising tides.
Selfish perhaps, but I’m fortunate to have been born late enough to have access to vaccines and antibiotics.
Early enough to have lived in an age where there are wild animals larger than a rat.
You’re quite right about densification. It’s bad architecture that bothers me, not density. I even think extremely tall towers can be beautiful, and I think getting lost in a canyon of dense and stunning architecture can be thrilling. This is true in the eclectic casbahs of North Africa, the aesthetically coordinated Haussmann blocks of central Paris, or just about anywhere in Manhattan south of Harlem. I love the thrill of living in a dense, animated downtown. But here in downtown Toronto it used to feel vibrant and now it’s a bland, overpriced, city-sized Starbucks Grande Latte. I think the thrill has been stifled by architecture which is deeply depressing, designed for nothing but short-term monetary gain on the increasingly speculatory and preposterous real estate market.
And the rents don’t help. So many of my artistically inclined friends have left the city because it’s just too expensive. I don’t want to live in a neighbourhood full of bankers. I like people whose ambitions in life are diverse and don’t focus on extreme wealth. Those people are being scattered into small towns, driven away from cities, when once they were drawn to them, and in coming together they made great culture.
I don’t want to live in a neighbourhood full of bankers. I like people whose ambitions in life are diverse and don’t focus on extreme wealth.
I was catching up with one of my dearest friends over the weekend. She’s a teacher – head of the arts department (art, music, textiles, drama etc) at her institution. The institution has started a ‘wellbeing committee’, which doesn’t have any representation from anyone in or attached to any part of the arts department.
Recently the committee put up posters encouraging students to go on a clue hunt that would reveal the five steps too wellbeing, with a prize for the first back in. It was scheduled at the same time as the music group were giving a free concert in the quad. Not only the clash of time, but the concept of attending a concert and rocking their little socks off for 45 minutes, could easily have been promoted as contributing to wellbeing.
As my friend snakily observed, “what has the arts ever contributed to wellbeing I ask you?”
And now Manchester is going the same way, I’m afraid. It started with Beetham Tower and now they’re sprouting all over. Add to that the building work going on on Pomona Island…
That video’s great! Riverdale is a spectacular neighbourhood, beautiful and vibrant and full of trees and parks. My mum lives there in a lovely government-subsidized (and green!) building for seniors, and I have friends who live there in charming townhouse apartments that are rent-stabilized, affordable, and operated by privately-run housing co-operatives. And frankly that’s what helps to keep the area vibrant: the market-rate housing is outrageously expensive, but there’s still some diversity of income in Riverdale’s population, at least for the lucky few who can get into subsidized units. And the condos are encroaching. The supermarket featured in that video, which is across the street from my mum (on which she depends for groceries as she’s not very mobile and doesn’t own a car) is slated for demolition to make way for — you’ll never guess!
That is a great video – I’m watching it now. Bonus – for a few seconds starting at 2:05 it shows an aerial view of the Seattle waterfront and Puget Sound and points west. My nabe is in the picture, though too far away to distinguish anything except that it’s beyond the towers.
The tower situation has only gotten worse since then. Much worse.
Ah streetcar suburbs. My nabe is kind of an in-city streetcar suburb – when it was built it wasn’t really all that in-city, although one can walk from here to the downtown core in less than an hour. We still have the original electric bus lines here, the first ones – the 1, 2, 3, and 4 lines. The 2 has a stop a block from where I live. The 1 is just 3 blocks down the hill. Both of them go downtown and then to the other side, which overlooks Lake Washington.
Ha! Two things come to mind.
One, how fitting that the one ugly tower in the 1995 pic is the aptly named Canada Square, the first of so many ugly towers to come. We Canucks — or at least we Torontonians, who often forget the rest of the country exists, because we’re so obsessed with trying to be New York we even parrot their snobbish faults — have gone all-in on cheap disposable glass-and-concrete phalluses (phalli?) in the sky.
Two, I’m reminded of the rivalry between beautiful, charming (but much smaller and much less economically powerful) Montreal and brash, tawdry Toronto. Acclaimed director Denis Villeneuve, a French-Canadian Montrealer, recently made a dark psychological film that was set here in Toronto, with Isabella Rossellini and Jake Gyllenhaal. It was called Enemy. He shot Toronto’s abundance of condo skyscrapers to make them look as absolutely monstrous and dystopian as possible, which I interpreted to be a very Montréalais dig at our disposable architecture.
That film, Enemy, has an astonishing end-credits sequence, that just sweeps over Toronto’s skyline in all its late-capitalist “glory”; it’s such a delicious and well-deserved insult to my beloved city. (Despite all its faults, my heart still belongs to Toronto.)
Here it is on YouTube, starting around the 1:30 mark. (Before that mark, arachnophobes beware.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR-ATzF-sHI
Seattle too is being loaded down with gigantic towers at great speed, but fortunately there’s no Christopher Wren gem in the foreground to make it all look cheap and nasty.
Ha, I see what you mean about that credit sequence. Grim!
Right?! It just goes and goes and goes. There’s no end in sight to the condos. Toronto has been the largest construction site outside China for several years now. I’m sure Seattle and Vancouver are in almost the same predicament. It never ends.
I’m so fortunate to be situated both in the dead-centre of downtown and right at the edge of a valley, which means down on street level it’s concrete and crowds and wailing cop cars and honking taxis, but up here my view is a serene panorama of trees and open sky. Problem is there’s this TEENSY sliver of land between me and the valley. A few little houses awkwardly stranded on a little island by the busy streets that trace the valley’s rim. Far too small a plot of land for a condo tower — or so I thought: the real estate market’s so damned hot now they’ve decided to turn that little sliver into a 50-storey luxury hotel, which will completely obliterate my view.
For now I can stand naked at the window and marvel at the valley below and the hawks above, but in a couple years I’ll have no privacy because 50 feet in front of my balcony will be a wall of rich bankers on business trips. Boooooooo!
Oh CRAP. No privacy and no view. That is the pits. I have a view – a hefty slice of Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains beyond. I couldn’t possibly afford it on the market but it’s a minuscule rent in exchange for dog-care for rich people who travel a lot. Best gig I ever found. I’d slaughter a whole row of bankers to keep it.
And you get to hang with a dog, too? Ridiculous. If Ayn Rand had her way, you’d be paying extra for that.
Hahahaha seriously. He’s the best dog in the world and I have to take him in his humans’ car to parks all over the city for long fun walks. Ayn Rand would be livid.
Well we do need densification… there’s got to be an acceptable and sustainable way to arrange all the humans along with their workplaces and necessities and amenities, but damned if I know what it is.
“…densification,,”
In a perfect world, a modest depopulation over a couple of generations is the only alternative to expensive anthills on the most desirable real estate.
that won’t happen of course, for the same reason that many of these towers are likely to be overwhelmed by the rising tides.
Selfish perhaps, but I’m fortunate to have been born late enough to have access to vaccines and antibiotics.
Early enough to have lived in an age where there are wild animals larger than a rat.
Happy Easter
@ibbica
You’re quite right about densification. It’s bad architecture that bothers me, not density. I even think extremely tall towers can be beautiful, and I think getting lost in a canyon of dense and stunning architecture can be thrilling. This is true in the eclectic casbahs of North Africa, the aesthetically coordinated Haussmann blocks of central Paris, or just about anywhere in Manhattan south of Harlem. I love the thrill of living in a dense, animated downtown. But here in downtown Toronto it used to feel vibrant and now it’s a bland, overpriced, city-sized Starbucks Grande Latte. I think the thrill has been stifled by architecture which is deeply depressing, designed for nothing but short-term monetary gain on the increasingly speculatory and preposterous real estate market.
And the rents don’t help. So many of my artistically inclined friends have left the city because it’s just too expensive. I don’t want to live in a neighbourhood full of bankers. I like people whose ambitions in life are diverse and don’t focus on extreme wealth. Those people are being scattered into small towns, driven away from cities, when once they were drawn to them, and in coming together they made great culture.
I was catching up with one of my dearest friends over the weekend. She’s a teacher – head of the arts department (art, music, textiles, drama etc) at her institution. The institution has started a ‘wellbeing committee’, which doesn’t have any representation from anyone in or attached to any part of the arts department.
Recently the committee put up posters encouraging students to go on a clue hunt that would reveal the five steps too wellbeing, with a prize for the first back in. It was scheduled at the same time as the music group were giving a free concert in the quad. Not only the clash of time, but the concept of attending a concert and rocking their little socks off for 45 minutes, could easily have been promoted as contributing to wellbeing.
As my friend snakily observed, “what has the arts ever contributed to wellbeing I ask you?”
And now Manchester is going the same way, I’m afraid. It started with Beetham Tower and now they’re sprouting all over. Add to that the building work going on on Pomona Island…
Here is something relevant to the discussion:
“Suburbs that don’t suck”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
@Jim
That video’s great! Riverdale is a spectacular neighbourhood, beautiful and vibrant and full of trees and parks. My mum lives there in a lovely government-subsidized (and green!) building for seniors, and I have friends who live there in charming townhouse apartments that are rent-stabilized, affordable, and operated by privately-run housing co-operatives. And frankly that’s what helps to keep the area vibrant: the market-rate housing is outrageously expensive, but there’s still some diversity of income in Riverdale’s population, at least for the lucky few who can get into subsidized units. And the condos are encroaching. The supermarket featured in that video, which is across the street from my mum (on which she depends for groceries as she’s not very mobile and doesn’t own a car) is slated for demolition to make way for — you’ll never guess!
Yup. A 400-foot-tall luxury condo tower.
That is a great video – I’m watching it now. Bonus – for a few seconds starting at 2:05 it shows an aerial view of the Seattle waterfront and Puget Sound and points west. My nabe is in the picture, though too far away to distinguish anything except that it’s beyond the towers.
The tower situation has only gotten worse since then. Much worse.
Ah streetcar suburbs. My nabe is kind of an in-city streetcar suburb – when it was built it wasn’t really all that in-city, although one can walk from here to the downtown core in less than an hour. We still have the original electric bus lines here, the first ones – the 1, 2, 3, and 4 lines. The 2 has a stop a block from where I live. The 1 is just 3 blocks down the hill. Both of them go downtown and then to the other side, which overlooks Lake Washington.
@Artymorty
I wouldn’t mind the condo tower so much if the bottom floor was a grocery store the people living in or near the tower could use.