This weekend – May 27 and 28, 2017 – is the 18th annual Doors Open Toronto. The event provides free and open access to “architecturally, historically, culturally and socially significant buildings across the city.” And in honor of Canada’s 150th birthday, 150 noteworthy spaces will be opening up their doors. The list of participating buildings can be found here.
I’m going through the list right now and curating my weekend itinerary. I’ve never been inside the Don Jail or the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, so I’d like to check those off. I plan to be on my bike and have my Fujifilm around my shoulder. If you’re also getting out this weekend, drop me a line on Twitter and let’s connect. What buildings are on your list?
At the time of writing this post, it’s still 2015 – at least here in Toronto. But by the time you (subscribers) get this post in your inbox, it will be 2016. So happy new year! I am thrilled about getting this year started and I hope you feel the same way.
To kick things off, I thought I would share a great interactive post from Guardian Cities called, A history of cities in 50 buildings. It’s a look at our urban history through 50 important and pivotal buildings. Buildings such as Southdale Center, which was the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall, and Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, which was a building that really set the stage for the modern skyscraper that we know today.
Not all of these buildings have left a positive legacy on our cities. I am sure that some of you would argue that the creation of the suburban shopping mall, with its corresponding “sea of parking”, was not a step forward for cities, but a step backwards. The architect behind Southdale Center, Victor Gruen, has even gone on record saying that he refuses “to pay alimony for those bastard developments.” He hated the shopping mall.
But like them or not, these buildings are part of our urban history, and I think it’s not only interesting but important to understand their impacts. If you want to see which important buildings were missed, at least according to Guardian readers, click here. I have to say that I was happy to see both Montréal and Toronto represented in the original list, as well as a few other buildings that I’ve written about here.
On that note, happy new year to you all, again, and many thanks for reading Architect This City. If you have any suggestions for content you would like to see on this blog in 2016, please leave it in the comment section below. This may be my personal blog, but my goal is to make it valuable for all of you. Hopefully I achieve that sometimes.
We tend to think of buildings as being very permanent structures. After all, our cities are filled with buildings that are hundreds of years old. And in some cases, much older.
But the reality is that buildings, just like everything else, depreciate over time. They have life cycles and they need to be regularly maintained and periodically renovated in order for them to survive.
This morning I was reading the blog of Witold Rybczynski, who is an author and architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. A few months ago he wrote a post talking about the short life cycle of modernist buildings.
According to a recent colloquium at the Getty Center, the average life span of a conventionally built building (masonry and wood) is about 120 years. But for modernist buildings (reinforced concrete and glass curtain wall) it’s half that: 60 years.
And if you are to consider the typical big box retail store, the life expectancy is probably a third of that – if even that. Usually it is cheaper to just tear down the old box and build a new one when needs change. That’s part of the reason why the leases usually have clauses that try and prevent the retailer from just “going dark” and stopping operation.
So we are literally not building them like we used to. And there’s a lot of debate in architecture and building circles about whether or not this poses a serious problem for cities. It is clear that Witold is unhappy about this shift.
I am a strong believer in heritage preservation. I believe wholeheartedly that cities are far richer with layers upon layers of history. But I also acknowledge that in our world of 6 second Vine videos, we seem to be less worried about whether something will last 60 or 120 years.
Perhaps that’s a problem. Or perhaps the times are just changing.