The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

THE INNER STUDIO
These islands are stuffed with dwarf trees, fountains, flowers, war
memorials, exhaust vents, and strange institutional sculptures,
forming a long pile of civic decoration that reflects an unconscious
narrative of the city’s history, present, and future. When I first
moved to Toronto, an armory sat on the site of what became the
new courthouse and we watched a parade march along from the
armory to the legislature. Today, there are no parades, just a strange
accretion of civic and infrastructural decisions that plainly reveal
the tired patriarchal persona of the city.
University Avenue is calling out to become a place. Cut off from
the lake and given the characters available, I would expand the
influence of the hospitals and devote the street to healing. Let’s
widen the sidewalks and get rid of the frozen stone monuments
that divide and unnecessarily broaden the street. Let’s plant long
rows of echinacea, squash, corn, and ceremonial tobacco and
create a healing garden. The widened sidewalks can host healing
demonstrations and be filled with vendors selling massages and
good food. We need to restore a thick canopy of trees that will shelter
patients, workers, and citizens who use the street. We need to
make a place that means something to its users and the city. While
four major hospitals face the street, there are many more significant
research, rehabilitation, and teaching facilities nearby, forming a
remarkable healing precinct in the very heart of the city. Until this
community receives a clearly themed physical presence, the warm
heart of city goes unnoticed. Great dramas of birth and death play
out every second in this urban precinct. Pedestrians range from the
grieving to the grateful, with countless doctors, nurses, and administrators
moving between facilities and appointments.
The unique life of the street deserves to be physically expressed
and mirrored. We have the possibility of transforming the core of
the city from a spatial statement about power to one that includes
healing, feeling, and reconciliation. We could rename the street
after Toronto’s own Lester B. Pearson. Why name an airport after a
peacemaker? We have lost our connection to the waters of life, but
we need not lose the powerful link to birth, sickness, healing, old
age, and death that lives at the heart of the ceremonial spine of
the city.
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