The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

TORONTO: THE CITY WHO IS WHOLE
Approaching Toronto
If you approach Toronto by car on the elevated expressway that
follows the shoreline of Lake Ontario, there are several exits that
will take you into the downtown, but only one can claim to be the
ceremonial route into Toronto. That is University Avenue, a street
that carries several of the city’s key institutions–including the opera
house, the courthouse, numerous insurance companies, and four
large hospitals–before it finally climaxes in Queen’s Park. Sitting in
the center of this park like a 19th-century matron at a picnic is a
great heap of Victorian stone and frumpy red-brick self-importance
that is the Provincial Legislature. Wrapped around Queen’s Park is
the campus of the University of Toronto. When I imagine this
assemblage viewed from above, the legislature resembles a pineal
gland wrapped in a green brain and surrounded by the eclectic
university campus–all of it sits like a radiant mind on the spine of
University Avenue.
This street is so formally vast yet so creatively modest that it
seems built to answer the question, “Do we have any nice clothing
to wear to the theater tonight?” It passes through the edges of
Chinatown, City Hall, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, but none of
these places influence the life of the street. It is this feeling of
emptiness and flattened monumentality that gives University
Avenue its character. If the buildings of this street were faces, they
would resemble the portraits found in an old men’s club.
The street that officially welcomes you to Toronto is not a flamboyant
ethnic boulevard, thick with pedestrians and great shops,
but a dull arterial road that feels exhausted by its role of trying to
link the Provincial headquarters with the place where the lake used
to be. This potentially powerful vista has been disturbed and
diluted by decades of landfill and other infrastructural victories
until finally, like a nail in the proverbial coffin, a large office tower
was erected that formally blocks the view of the lake and cuts off
any chance that the life-giving waters will influence the great street.
A subway line runs beneath the street and its presence helps to
explain a series of elongated traffic islands that stretch down the
length of the street, separating north- and southbound traffic.
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