You’ve probably encountered this conversational exchange a number of times. ‘What’s you’re earliest memory’

My partner who prides herself on her memory generally claims her earliest memory is from eighteen months. I find myself competitively struggling to dredge something up, my best had been, I believe, from age four years. But of late I’ve been working on this one memory fragment and after checking with my father I believe I’ve got it down to 3 years and a bit. Three years at best. It’s actually quite a frightening memory and perhaps that is why it had not shown up until lately. Even then for the longest while I thought it was a bad early dream. It’s so vague, nonsensical, like a dream. It really is just a fragment. The memory is of wandering in our tree-lined neighborhood then abruptly encountering this vast red brick wall. I remember looking one way then the other and all I could see was the bricks, red and smooth. In my mind’s eye I can even see that the pointing was quite tidy. The brick wall filled my entire horizon. I somehow knew that where I had been was on the other side of this vast wall and that I must return, somehow. I was lost. For some reason I remember that I didn’t even turn around to look behind me. I just knew that I had to get through the wall to get back home. Home was on the other side of the wall. I’m fairly certain that this was also my first encounter with vanishing points. Although it may be that my adult psyche has overlain this image with what I now know to be perspective. In both directions the mortar lines converged and smeared visually in the distance. Although this vision was probably mixed in with tears I had become quite frantic, confused. Then my memory goes blank. I know nothing of the relief of being found. When I asked my father about the various places we had lived by way of zeroing in on the timeline of this particular memory. The best match we could both come up with given my knowledge of Toronto’s neighbourhoods and my father’s chronology was that this was the Kensington Market neighbourhood and that the vast brick wall was the Bathurst street side of Toronto Western Hospital. He had this vague recollection of one of the boys getting lost momentarily. I didn’t want to let on to him what a living nightmare it had been and was somehow relieved to know all these years hence that it wasn’t such a big deal. I was oddly comforted by the casualness that punctuated our conversation: ‘Oh, was that you’? The offhandedness character of his response made me wonder why, of all the scrapes that we three boys had got into subsequently, why this memory, when set against the rest, had such frightening cast to it.

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Marshall McLuhan, lately in preparation for a (...read more...)

The blind architect takes the idea of vision out of its habitual context and assembles the situation in critical ways to make you see them with other eyes.

Sighted people cannot function well in low lighting conditions and are generally completely helpless in total darkness. Their homes are usually very brightly lit at great expense, as are businesses that cater to the sighted consumer.

The theoretical measured space is the distance between what you are expected to see and what you are actually seeing.

“To understand architecture you must collide with it.”

We’ve just moved offices, to Spadina north of Queen. Top floor of a warehouse building with views all over the city. And the CN Tower, over-sized, right in our face. Too big to fit in the window.

When I started, the first office had the same view but further back, from College. The tower fit better then, standing just apart from the downtown but in composition with it. Now the Railway Lands apartments crowd around the base, still dwarfed but with the insouciant scale and shoulders that they don’t care.

When the Eiffel Tower was built in the 1880’s all progressive opinion was against it. Zola, de Maupassant, Garnier, Dumas and the rest of right thinking Paris wrote a 300 signature condemnation of the monstrous intrusion in their city’s landscape. No such clamour greeted the CN Tower thirty years ago, but its undeniable presence in the skyline does raise a fundamental question.

Is it beautiful, the CN Tower? Do its perfect curves overcome the concrete thickness of the column? Does the SkyPod add or detract to its essential proportions? Could the stepping in the upper section be more regular? Is it not quite tall enough? Why are there warts and pimples all over it? Is there something essentially teenage about the Tower, a striving gawkiness that’s both endearing and irritating?

The tower looks suddenly older now. More desiccated, almost spindly. Has the midlife erosion of hope in the city aged it? Is that long unconsummated engagement with the SkyDome drying it up? Surely as they both get into their thirties we should do something for them, cloth them in red satin and leave them to it. We need them both to create some passion.

When the Tower was being built I worked in City Hall. I could see it coming up from my desk through one of the side windows. The last sections were lowered on by an enormous helicopter in the last few days of fall before the weather closed in. Toronto had joined the world of cities. It still chases an elusive beauty.

‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ – I can hear her say – in a nasal tone – a voice that contributed to the noise pollution of my home economics class some twenty-five years ago. Well – I certainly want to be heaven bound – my teen Baptist brain surmises – as I wipe the pencil marks off the plastic of my stark white binder. Is it true? But of course, my Sunday school teacher confirms, as my obsession with cleanliness manifests rapidly.

Fast forward to 1998 – a snow storm – Toronto - my new home. I feel overburdened. I cannot possibly clean all of the snow from my driveway. I wish for a heated drive, a heated sidewalk, some solar contraption to melt the snow and an enormous stream cleaner for the detailed cracks and crevices that wrap the paving stones. Working at the waterfront fosters my obsessive compulsiveness. Bottles ebb and dive as seagulls swoop for bits of trash and food popping up and down in the murky water. Tires ring the docks as boats carelessly rock against the wood. As if the best use of old tires is to cast them as bumpers for water vessels? Is this the best the city has to offer? I wonder about, shivering in the cool wind and I notice the fragile flowers attempting to spout in a late spring. There are too few to cheer my soul and I retreat to the office, where my colleagues are designing a new city in the Middle East - one where careful mathematical calculations contribute to the precise cutting of stone for a gleaming man-made waterway.