The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

THE INNER STUDIO
town. Descending in space our bodies feel heavier and more at
home. Descent invokes regression, solemnity, and groundedness.
Signs are posted warning of the possibility of floods. We have gone
down to the roots of the place. Nature quietly asserts itself and we
feel at one with all life, though we have left the city far behind. Seen
from below the horizon, urban life is made of fragments–the odd
tower, a roofline–and coming in and out of view through the dense
forest canopy, the majestic bridges that carry the city across these
forgotten lands. The greatest of these, the Bloor Street Viaduct, flies
like a Victorian airplane over the ravine, its reputation as a suicide
platform a grim reminder of the negative power of the modern
underworld. Everything is reversed now. Nature dominates and the
city is occasional. The immense scale of the Don Valley is revealed.
Moving along the overgrown trails reminds me of walking along
streambeds in a Yucatan jungle searching for traces of the built
world.
Occasionally the dank humid air of the underbelly is pierced by
strange blasts of cold air as water collected from the night rains
surges through storm drains forcing cool subterranean air out the
overgrown drain covers. This is our accidental grotto; it’s more a
moment in time than a place. The potential of the ravines as soothing
lands remains. This is a place we need to learn from. Can places
like this be built? If not how do we expand their wild and healing
presence in the city? We have yet to let the fairies and earth nymphs
out of their wet cradle. I think all it would take is a special flight of
stairs that could link the underworld to the city. We need these
places so our bodies can return to the moist world they come from.
The health of the city lives here.
Lost Shoreline
The other natural feature we’ve lost contact with is the shoreline
itself. Toronto was a port fed by the Great Lakes and the St.
Lawrence River. Economics shifted the freight away, but not before
Toronto filled in its shoreline first for the freighters, then the railways,
then the highways, and, most recently, the condominiums.
The result left the city with a shoreline that seems more like an artificial
limb than a place where the elements mix. It is strange, not
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