Saturday 1 October 2005
Yesterday I popped by the Royal Ontario Museum to visit the library and photocopy a few articles for an out-of-town friend. I’d never been to their library, so it was a neat adventure. Little did I know that in the month since I was last there, they’d moved the main entrance around the side of the building to the group entrance (soon to be the “back” of the building, once the renovations are complete).
Inside, I signed in and since there was no direct route to the library, what with the renovations, I had to wait a bit for someone to escort me through the labyrinthine back corridors to the library, where a very nice lady (who looked startling like an Indian version of my mother) fetched the required books.
One of them was a seventy-year-old German bibliography and list of hominid fossils, with a terrifyingly brittle cover bearing the title Fossilium catalogus. I: Animalia — Editus a W. Quenstedt. I couldn’t find the proper pages at first, and it turned out that the pages hadn’t been cut apart. “You must be the first person to read this book,” the librarian remarked as she went to fetch the Page Cutting Knife.
Once I’d copied the articles, it was back to the outside world, which seemed to be an even longer way, including going up a flight of stairs and then down in an elevator. Very mysterious. Must remember this all for future writings.
Wednesday 8 May 2002
I dropped by the Toronto Reference Library today. Designed by Raymond Moriyama, it’s one of the loveliest interiors in the city: huge, airy, impressive and yet intimate, with plenty of natural light, water sculptures decorating the ground floor, and generous skylit reading areas. The north end has a stunning view of Rosedale Valley and the uptown towers of Yonge Street. The only real downer (aside from the rather bleak expanses of blank brick on the outside) is the fact that all the upper floors ring a giant atrium, making it necessary to walk all the way around them if you’re headed for the opposite corner.
It’s part of a period in architecture that I particularly love, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on: those buildings that were built by governments in the 1960s and ‘70s. Although they vary widely, there’s a distinctive feel to them, and some common elements, like the use of 45-degree angles and circular forms, lots of brick and warm colours, and vanes to cut down glare and break up blank ceilings.
Those subways that were built in the ‘60s and ‘70s are great examples. I happened on a book about the Montreal Metro recently that was full of this sort of thing: strikingly patterned concrete, angled walls, integrated art and so on. The contemporary stations I’ve seen in Boston and other cities are similar. (Check out Matt McLauchlin’s loving tribute, Montréal By Metro.)
In Toronto, the 1978 Spadina Line is the prime example, with eight unique stations (most of which, unfortunately, are in the median of a minor expressway). Eglinton West is warm and welcoming; Glencairn is quiet and curiously intimate, with lots of small walls to break up its space; Lawrence West has a mezzanine decorated in bright primary colours, while walls of plain concrete lend its platform a quiet dignity; Dupont, probably the most remarked-upon, is mysterious, simultaneously cave-like and futuristic with its round corners and giant circular lights. In their day, all the stations sported original artworks, though some have faded and some have had to be dismantled, notably Yorkdale’s vaulted ceiling of rainbow neon designed by Michael Hayden.
So what is it that I find so appealing about this era? I think it’s a feeling of genuine optimism and civic-mindedness. I’ve only lived in Toronto itself for a couple of years, but it didn’t take long to notice the sense many have of the 1970s as a kind of golden, enlightened age. New expressways were turned back by those living in their path; plans to scrap the city’s streetcar network were abandoned; alienating high-rise housing projects gave way to sensibly planned new neighborhoods. The future seemed bright and human.
I think we could use a little more of that right about now.
