Category: Toronto

Medusa

Rough week. Glad to see it coming to an end, but at the same time wish I could take a mulligan. These past few days I felt much of the bad and good of living in Toronto — the anonymity and commodification of human interaction that comes with any big city, mixed with Toronto’s own brand of coldness. And a wonderful slice of Toronto the good, in the form of lively and festive trick-or-treating with my daughter and friends, right in the heart of the city, with generous candy for the kids and mulled wine for the parents, the perfect beverage to sip as I dutifully followed the girls along, my own daughter’s movements easily tracked by the flashing lights embedded in her snake covered headdress.

Brutalism then and now

In 1970s Toronto the architectural style was brutalist, a mix of intimidating concrete boxes and drab gray fortresses. The high/low point of the style is Robarts library, a soul-crushing monster with split-level windows patterned after a medieval castle. It seems to me that the building in my photo, recently completed in the new Library District on lower Bathurst, is a modern steel and glass interpretation of brutalist architecture, and in particular of Robarts unequally-sized conjoined forms.

Urban wilderness

The city has its own kind of wilderness. Not the parks or trails. These are trimmed and manicured spaces, no more natural than a bonsai tree (or kitten, remember those?). The city’s wild spaces are the product of decay and neglect, where entropy rules and anarchy prevails.