{"id":974,"date":"2006-07-11T22:31:48","date_gmt":"2006-07-12T02:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=974"},"modified":"2006-07-11T23:37:54","modified_gmt":"2006-07-12T03:37:54","slug":"the-whole-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2006\/07\/11\/the-whole-city\/","title":{"rendered":"The Importance of Everyday Architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not always on exactly the same page as the Star<\/em>‘s architecture\/urban critic Christopher Hume when it comes to individual buildings, but I like the way he thinks about the big picture.<\/p>\n

In today’s paper, his column<\/a> made a deeply important point that I’ve felt has been overlooked for a long time: It’s the vernacular, everyday architecture that makes a city<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What is a city, after all, but an inhabitable infrastructure? Torontonians must stop looking for the quick fix — the Olympics, the World’s Fair, whatever. They are not the answer. In fact, given the way we approach development, they would likely lead to even more damage.<\/p>\n

It’s time to think small, one building, one park, one garden, one schoolyard, one corner, one streetscape at a time, not to drown the city in what Jane Jacobs termed “cataclysmic money.” That we don’t need.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s what I would add. People often look to flashy super-projects, such as the ROM or OCAD, to make Toronto more interesting and sophisticated. But if you look at cities visitors love, it’s not a flashy building — the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in New York — that makes the city. It’s the fact that you can walk and walk for miles and all the ordinary, practical buildings are attractive and form a great urban environment. It’s a depth<\/em> of building quality that makes a city.<\/p>\n

Hume and I might disagree on a few of the more interesting houses, condos and office buildings that have been built in the last two decades in Toronto, but we would agree on about 75% of all the new buildings in Toronto: they are crap — dull, thoughtless, and unconnected to the city around them. There are definitely some exceptions, but we notice them because<\/em> they’re exceptions. They shouldn’t be exceptions — they should be the norm.<\/p>\n

This is a really important issue because the city’s current development plan is to intensify the city’s main streets and turn them into “avenues” that will be the shape of the new city. But if the buildings that go up on these avenues are dull, generic, monolithic and do not connect with and frame the street, then Toronto will be little better off than it was before, still reliant for its attractive areas on those neighbourhoods built before the middle of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

We need to make NEW attractive, effective streets and neighbourhoods, too, and to do that, we need to make a real effort. The city needs to set an example in the work it does itself (streetscapes, public buildings, parks), and we — the city and its citizens — need to learn to demand a real effort from private developers. New buildings — ordinary ones such as houses, condos, retail — can’t just be vaguely acceptable. They have to be good<\/em>. The current situation is not good enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not always on exactly the same page as the Star‘s architecture\/urban critic Christopher Hume when it comes to individual buildings, but I like the way he thinks about the big picture. In today’s paper, his column made a deeply important point that I’ve felt has been overlooked for a long time: It’s the vernacular,Continue reading “The Importance of Everyday Architecture”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4006,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[2860,2861,340,2858,2859,504,469,470,2426,2565,405,2566,19],"class_list":["post-974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","tag-architectureurban-critic","tag-centre-pompidou","tag-christopher-hume","tag-guggenheim","tag-inhabitable-infrastructure","tag-jane-jacobs","tag-new-york","tag-paris","tag-retail","tag-the-olympics","tag-the-star","tag-the-world","tag-toronto"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Importance of Everyday Architecture - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2006\/07\/11\/the-whole-city\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Importance of Everyday Architecture - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m not always on exactly the same page as the Star‘s architecture\/urban critic Christopher Hume when it comes to individual buildings, but I like the way he thinks about the big picture. 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