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Toronto, Ontario
If you look like that I swear I'm gonna love you more
From Pittsburgh we head north to Toronto for Open Doors Toronto, the Open House New York of Canada.
While the doors were open at the Hockey Hall of Fame, it was not an Open Doors Toronto site and they even charged admission- all Open Doors Toronto sites are free. Still I found it too hard to pass up a chance yet again to ascend the stairs into the old Bank of Montreal building and see its star attraction, the single greatest trophy of the most righteous of all sports- amateur or professional, real or imagined. There you can see the Vezina Trophy (awarded annually to the NHL's best goaltender) while one of the Stanley Cups (there's more than one you know) waits to pose with yet another nameless fan who came all this way to just stand next to it and prove to themselves that it really exists
My single favorite picture from this past weekend's Doors Open Toronto event, this is everything you need to see of the Burwash Dining Hall (the sad truth is that the inside wasn't nearly as nice as this singular view out).
One of the star attractions was the just opened Four Seasons Performing Arts Center by Diamond Schmitt. The main attraction there was the lobby, with Canadians everywhere exploring all of the stairs and balconies and, like me, finding a spot to hang out for a while for some first rate people watching.
More than any other building this is the one I really wanted to see, the one that in many ways made me even want to go to the Doors Open event in the first place this year. This is OCAD- an art school- and its Sharpe Centre for Design, an expansion to OCAD designed by British architect Will Alsop. Unlike a more traditional addition, this one involves a great big tabletop that floats above the existing school and is held up by a series of colorful stilts (and of course a massive elevator core). As happy as it may all be from the outside, the inside was surprisingly normal, a series of classrooms with small square windows that looked older and more beat up than I would have expected for a building that is barely three years old.
Right across the street from my hotel (I stayed at the Fairmont Royal York this time around), Union Station may always have its doors open but still it offered special behind the scenes tours to places in the station that you would normally still be shut out of. This was the last building I toured on Sunday, and at the time I was undecided between Union Station and the Royal York's similar behind the scenes tour. What tipped the scales was seeing this, people walking across the glass floor between the big window on the west end of the great hall, you know the one you pass under on your way to that serviceable yet ill planned skywalk to the CN Tower (I had always wanted to walk across the similar one in Grand Central Terminal in New York, but that is now reserved only for Metro North employees due to some type of hard to define security issue). Once inside the big window, the space between the glass was interesting but admittedly not as exciting as I imagined, unfortunately it felt more as if I was in some sort of greenhouse than that I was some sort of ghostly silhouette floating inside such a mammoth window.
Part of me had hoped that the Doors Open weekend would include a preview of the about to open ROM addition by New York architect Daniel Libeskind, but all of the construction workers feverishly toiling outside confirmed that it just wasn't meant to be. The new addition is on the Bloor Street side and is already pretty damn hard to miss- people lined both sides of the street just staring at it and wondering what they should be thinking about it. The interior of the building did get a rave review today in the Toronto Star, but personally I have some issues with the exterior. I don't mind the massing and actually like the way it muscles over Bloor Street, but personally think that the pop out windows and metal plank siding are an almost unforgivable mistake for something that calls itself a crystal.
And if you’re wondering how I got these interior pictures of a closed building, well there’s a simple explanation to that. Open Doors Toronto may be in May, but these pictures with snow on the streets were taken seven months later in December.
After last year's reasonably successful last minute office Boston trip, my office's traditional christmas party was once again replaced with another late December one day office blitz trip. This year's destination was the always righteous city of Toronto, home to buildings by famous architects (Santiago Calatrava, Mies van der Rohe, Will Alsop, Daniel Libeskind, Moshe Safdie, Norman Foster) as well as the Stanley Cup- an important fact since the voting majority of the office (just like all good offices everywhere) consists primarily of hockey fans. And since I can't go anywhere without taking a picture and over describing it, here are some pictures from winter in Toronto.
Longtime readers of the slideshows may remember the following bold (or quite possibly reckless) declaration several years back:
My future resting place. Really.
On more than one occasion and to multiple people I have expressed a clear desire to have my ashes scattered in this place. The atrium at BCE Place (unmistakably designed by Santiago Calatrava) has always been one of my favorite spaces- a simple corridor connecting some faceless office buildings, one of my favorite restaurants (the Movenpick Marche) and the Hockey Hall of Fame, home of the Stanley Cup (see Slide 3). I'm not saying it will be easy- there will be security, tourists and maintenance crews to deal with as you try and scatter a decent amount of ash and charred bone chips across a public space with some dignity. Something to look forward to I guess.
from Seasons don't fear the reaper, nor do the wind or the sun or the rain, May 2003
Some time has passed since then, the Movenpick Marche is gone (although in name only) and I have had some time to reflect on such rash statements. I'm not backtracking, I'm just clarifying. I want to be scattered on the street level under the glass ceiling, not in the restaurant, not in the Hockey Hall of Fame and definitely not downstairs on the moderately depressing food court level (the fountain area upstairs is ok but not really preferred). Failure to do so will force me to haunt you from beyond whatever watery or fiery grave I may have found myself inadvertently trapped in. Also remember that if a body wasn't actually recovered from the "accident" then chances are damn good that I managed to successfully fake my own death. Just an early heads up.
