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So, I went to Toronto in June of this year to meet my partner. It feels surreal for two reasons, one being that I never expected my life to become the plot of a bad romantic comedy, and the other being that it makes me the only member of my family to have ever been in North America. It was also an interesting dichotomy - I loved spending time with my SO, but detested the city. I couldn't stop noticing just how ugly and unmaintained the city is, and couldn't help wondering how it got this way. Disclaimer: I spent much of my time downtown.
It's a ridiculously Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia or any of its previous satellite states. Much of their architecture, including their public spaces, looks like it's trying to be a soulless pastiche of Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius; structures supposedly built for the public that actually looks like it hates the very people it's meant to serve. They are featureless blocks of concrete that evoke no joy, and in line with the modernist architectural ethos ornamentation is basically absent. Also, if there is any doubt about the unpopularity of modernist and postmodernist architecture alike, look at "America's Favourite Architecture", very few of the buildings people actually chose as their favourites are from the post-war period. The response from many architects was that the list didn't reflect the opinions of "architectural experts", which isn't insular and elitist at all. Good to see that people who build for the public actively couldn't care less about their aesthetic preferences, and in fact are incapable of predicting their preferences at all.
The starkest example of the shift in architectural trends is probably the current Toronto City Hall. The new City Hall is a featureless, barely geometric concrete block, framed by the treeless, austere Nathan Phillips Square - apparently supposed to be a public gathering space. Now compare it with Old City Hall, which is still there but no longer in use. I think most people would view Old City Hall as a much more appropriate building for its purpose, and find it more pleasing to look at. Another example of the modernist turn is exemplified in the Royal Ontario Museum, a building that looked like this in 1922. Then it had a (now-defunct) planetarium and terrace galleries attached to it in 1968 and 1984, then in 2007 oh my god what the fuck is that. There is not an iota of respect for any of their architectural traditions. Old buildings that are part of the city's heritage just get "iterated upon" and superseded by horrific modernist/postmodern/deconstructivist blocks with no relation or connection to the previous style the building used to have.
The same pattern can be seen in public art. This infamous piece of public art, named Zones of Immersion, is displayed in the tube in Union Station, one of the TTC's major transportation hubs, and it succeeds marvellously at offering your average commuter the indescribable experience of being loaded on a train headed straight for Auschwitz. According to the artist, Stuart Reid, "This window into our contemporary isolation offers faces and body language, blurred and revealed poetic writings from my journal entries, and rhythms of colour that punctuate the ribboned expanse." I, too, would like to be reminded of the bleakness and misery of everyday life every time I try to go to work. This is a very clear example of an artist being distanced from the very people they are designing for, and pursuing clout in an increasingly small and incestuous sphere of "art fanatics" who have long disappeared up their own ass in the endless pursuit of social status. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone wasn't forced to look at it every day.
As if it wasn't bad enough that the city is by and large a mix of seedy strip malls and truly unpleasant brutalist blocks, on top of that there's the sheer lack of maintenance of any of these spaces. The train stations are some of the best examples of this - the poor state of the TTC is well known at this point among Canadians. These tubes are depressing spaces often badly disfigured by water damage, missing tiles and ceilings, and just in general seem to be falling apart at the seams. Here and here are some illustrations of normal scenes in the tube system. The same applies to many of the buildings, where their already unfriendly-looking concrete surfaces are further marred by water stains and damage, and nobody seems to have given it any care for decades. Other aspects of the city's design also worsen the experience, such as how when you walk around the city centre on hot days an awful stench will often waft out of the gutter grates (Yonge in particular smells like human faeces). Oh, and then there's the homelessness problem, which I won't get into here but really worsens the sense of dinginess and disrepair that the city already possesses. Downtown, there is at least one encampment every kilometre you walk.
The general vibe of the city is also information-overload in the worst way; an instance that sticks in my mind was when I was walking in the town centre and all at once the following was happening in a crowded square:
Someone playing a flute in an absolutely fucking ridiculous way that somehow almost reminded me of Kazoo Kid.
Someone trying to proselytise the glory of God to random passers-by.
Somebody with burns trying to solicit money by sitting naked in the street showing the grisly scars all the way down his body.
There was probably more happening that my brain filtered out so as to preserve my sanity.
All of this could've been compensated for if there were many particularly interesting things to see, but the issue is that there just isn't very much that's worth stopping and looking at. The Royal Ontario Museum and perhaps the Distillery District are virtually the only things worth visiting, the Art Gallery of Ontario is only worth stopping by for the Group of Seven paintings (which are, to be fair, beautiful to see in person). The CN Tower and everything around it are unashamed tourist traps built and maintained largely for vanity purposes, without all too much to do there. The beach on Centre Island was hardly a beach at all, and seemed dirty enough that I didn't really want to step on the sand barefoot (though I am almost certainly spoiled with the best beaches in the world due to living in Australia). Outside of that, I can't remember anything else particularly memorable about the city.
In short, I didn't like Toronto. It was unpleasant enough that once I got out of the airport in Sydney, I walked into the train station at International and heaved a massive sigh of relief at how spacious, light, quiet and well-maintained it all seemed.
Welcome to brutalism. Making nice things is boring and passé, proper architects hate your guts and let you know it.
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Soviet brutalist architecture can be very apt: consider in particular the Kyiv Crematorium (halfway down the list).
Sure, but "brutalism is apt for buildings that are meant to be morbid" is hardly an argument in favour of its application everywhere a la Chandigarh (in Toronto, that kind of architecture is a staple of everyday life). I also think the Kyiv Crematorium is quite ugly, and I wouldn't build a crematorium like that, but different strokes, I guess. The only one I like in there at all is the museum in Tashkent, and that's because it uses some ornamentation and maintains some level of continuity with earlier architectural traditions, but ornament is anathema to many modernists.
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Endorsed -- be aware that everyone in Canada (other than people from Toronto, who will smugly inform you that 'it's a World Class City') has felt the same way since roughly 1965:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-4x54lnkCMw
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Heavy disagree, honestly. Lived in Moscow and Toronto. Toronto is possibly nothing like Russia
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The best description of Toronto I've heard is that its a city that "thinks its the equal of New York, but in reality is less then half of a Chicago". I would have judged this an unfair critique until I met a bunch of people from Toronto, all of whom thought that I should have been impressed by their status as denizens of the aforementioned metro area (in fairness, New Yorkers and Londoners do this too, and are just as mad when I do not ask for their recommendations for the most up to date and hip spots in town, but in theory there are places in NYC and LON that i would want to visit, Toronto has no such saving grace). I guess I don't connect with people who are boosters for their home city, and that seems to be a large percentage of Torontians.
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🤨🤨🤨
Toronto is very sprawled and mediocre, despite people who live there never being willing to admit it, it's just a large Midwestern city no different than Cleveland or Indianapolis. However while I can't make any insight into whether the art community is shrinking or growing, the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist. Consider how bland and boring most public art is:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/city-of-calgary-public-art-1.6757072
https://globalnews.ca/news/8787114/the-ring-art-place-ville-marie-esplanade/
That's probably what I hate the most in the modern art criticism. Nothing against you personally, but this is so unsatisfactory and lazy. I mean I get all the things about "everything can be art" and pop-art and readymade and stuff. But when a seagull pooping on my shoulder is art (it certainly makes me feel emotions!), I think this makes the whole thing meaningless. Maybe that's the goal, but I know it is not meaningless. I have been to the museums. I know how art can make me feel, and I know it is something. Something that "ha-ha, made you look!" is not. These two aren't just part of the same worlds, and maybe I can't explain with proper jargon why exactly, but I know it.
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It's long distance, and "member of my family" here just means people related by blood.
They certainly succeeded at making a piece of art that evokes emotions, but that's just not my criteria for what constitutes good art since (as someone who dabbles in arts myself, primarily literature and music) I think it's trivially easy to do so - especially if you consider "intense hatred of and anger at the artist" a valid emotion. Part of the problem is that the art in Union Station looks like it was taken straight from an unfinished sketch. Skill is an integral part of it for me - an important part of being an artist is constantly questioning what you bring to the world others couldn't already offer themselves, and if your art lacks technique and is easily replicated, you genuinely don't offer much. In order for any art to be considered good at all, there also needs to be a way for it to be bad, there needs to be a non-trivial set of failure-criteria that a sizeable amount of people would not be able to satisfy. A lot of modern artists, even celebrated ones (e.g. Rothko) don't have that.
Furthermore, there are works that fit an art gallery that don't work in a public space people have to frequent every day. I don't know about you, but I don't think Francisco Goya's Black Paintings should be displayed in a public square, and that was constructed with infinitely more talent than whatever was in Union Station. I would honestly rather have an inoffensive, bland piece of public art than something that makes me feel depressed or annoyed every time I encounter it.
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The architecture thing is a dead horse, but at the same time, they can't keep getting away with it. The worst thing I've seen recently is Vienna's modern art museum which they plopped into the middle of a nice 18th century baroque complex (pay no attention to the building with the cock and balls on the roof).
What a perfect illustration. Just an ugly box next to perfectly nice buildings would be an injury, but they had to add an insult to it by adorning it with a massive penis. So everybody knows what they meant by it.
We must be glad that the cock is on the roof where you can't see it.
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