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First Canadian Place vs. Empire State Building

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Iy1H_4adc[/youtube]

This time lapse of First Canadian Place by izod shot during it signage makeover (the old iconic blue M replaced with the unfortunate BMO) reminded me of Andy Warhol’s Empire. I do not believe anybody but the most stoned-out Factory denizens have ever sat through Empire’s entire 8 hours, filmed on the night of July 25, 1964 from 8:06 pm to 2:42 am from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building, 16 blocks from the Empire State Building. Still, it’s a heck of an idea, and the six minute excerpt of it below (officially excerpts were not allowed) is probably enough.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7idi_5IaMrk[/youtube]

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5 comments

  1. A city’s tallest building is an interesting blip in the civic psychological radar. In his book on the subject, Mark Kingwell discusses how the Empire State Building’s “once again the tallest” after 9/11 has caused it to resume its former place in the city’s collective consciousness for the first time since the 60’s.

    Then again, some people will argue that the CN Tower is indeed a building so I guess First Canadian Place only holds that spot for some people.

  3. “I do not believe anybody but the most stoned-out Factory denizens have ever sat through Empire’s entire 8 hours…”

    When Empire played Cinematheque in October 2006, there were apparently eighteen people in the audience, a handful of whom (including the Star’s Peter Howell, who sent out periodic updates via his Blackberry, which were later published in the paper as a diary) made it through the duration. I just discovered that another person kept a log of the experience.

    Although due to Cinematheque not having a sound film projector capable of running at sixteen frames per second (the film’s intended speed), they had to show the film at nineteen frames per second, which meant that the movie only took about seven and a quarter hours to unspool.

  5. Just a brief statement about the First Canadian Place Time Lapse (for those interested). I shot it from the 13th floor of the Simcoe tower, so it’s the West facing side of FCP and was the first to undergo the logo change. Had I known that they were changing the logo, I would have tried to capture the entire swap! It looked like they were just doing some maintenance on it, and indeed took weeks to complete the first side before moving on to the other three.