The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

THE INNER STUDIO
Three Places We Are Not
Three brash and boldly charismatic buildings were built downtown:
a huge downtown shopping center, the world’s tallest
freestanding structure, and a stadium for 50,000 people that
features a roof that can open or close depending on the weather.
The largest, the tallest, the most remarkable. They rest on the
ground, but they actually seem as though they have been dropped
into place from high above. We love them without affection
because we built them to please and impress others. Not surprisingly,
we are uneasy with their proud ambitions because of our
discomfort with all things boastful or extroverted. Unconsciously,
we were hoping they would help us get recognized and legitimize
our city. Their lasting contribution to urban life may be that they
gave the core of the city a heavy-handed mass ensuring that the
downtown precinct will always have a gravity that can never be
overwhelmed by the centrifugal forces of the suburbs. When the
city suffers from an ugliness caused by too little thought, this can
usually be seen and accepted as a kind of kitsch. When the ugliness
is the result of too much thought, however, this is more difficult to
redeem. Let’s declare a moratorium on planning studies and let’s
finance an army of hungry designers to create new images of what
the city could become if our goal was beauty. Every city is like an
immense Self, never completed, always missing parts of its own
wholeness and yet stubbornly resilient. A city gives more than it
takes and this capacity for generosity that we take for granted and
are so dependent on needs to be artfully supported.
So far did we drift from our true nature that when we built a
new public square in the downtown on a busy shopping street, it
had a strangely resistant quality. The space needs to offer instructions.
We need John Candy overlooking the place the way Marcus
Aurelius sits charismatically upon his horse in the Piazza del
Campidoglio in Rome. Understandably, when presented with a
void people actually preferred to walk around the space than
through it. To stand in the emptiness that is Dundas Square,
surrounded by branded advertising and news signage, is to feel like
a pixel in a mildly pornographic show on high-definition TV.
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