Our skyline is being defined for a generation, probably several, and it looks like Toronto’s decided it’s got a heart of glass.
But before the cult of mirrored and transparent rectilinearity bedazzled our pragmatic developers and their pet architects, Toronto allowed itself to show a little detail, some of which is on display at the Market Gallery’s show of the city’s Art Deco and Style Moderne history.
"Art Deco was a great escape route for designers coming of age during and after the First World War," says Alec Keefer, president of the Toronto Architectural Conservancy, which is putting on the show. "Those, like Alfred Chapman, J. J. Woolnough and Martin Baldwin, were looking for an approach that was daring and muscular. Art Deco and its successor
Style Moderne allowed them to rid themselves of the cult and sophisticated trappings of classical elegant restraint that epitomized the Anglo-British school, full of conceits and mannerisms that was then the norm."
The exhibition, which opened on Saturday and runs until Jan. 25 on the second floor of St. Lawrence Market, is a good opportunity to get in touch with the burst of development Toronto experienced in the 1920s and 30s, much of which has since been replaced.
It's also a chance to think more general thoughts about Toronto's sense of self and place, leading viewers to look for themselves into other eras. Keefer has one, in particular, he'd like to see more attention paid to.
"In the decade immediate preceding the First World War," he says, "under the
National Economic Policy there was a true explosion in the construction of factories, commercial lofts, and warehouses. These over engineered beauties are one our greatest cultural and economic assets. They can if successfully managed be one of the truly economic generators, employing a work force even greater than when they were first opened."
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Alec Keefer