Reading Toronto is on the mailing list of a group following Canada's historic "Trend Houses." The Trend House was Canada's version of mass produced modern housing designed for the fifties suburb. A few days ago Toronto lost one that formerly occupied the lot at 48 Rathburn Street. Adam Sobalak says:

In my opinion, what happened with the Trend House at 48 Rathburn--a property of national architectural and historical significance--is, in its way, a bigger catastrophe than the Inn On The Park. Or (pending) the Bata Building. Maybe even than anything else, heritage-loss-wise, in post-amalgamation.

Want to know more about the Trend House? Here's a link.

For anyone with an interest in the fusion of architectural design with techniques of mass production, note that the Trend House concept is part of a bigger post war trend in supplying the market with affordable housing after the Second World War. In the US, the most publicized proponent of mass-production was Buckminster Fuller. His Dymaxion House designs were built by the factories in Kansas that once employed thousands of workers producing B-22 bombers. Fuller figured that by using the same techniques and materials to build houses he could revolutionize the US housing market. He was wrong.

Fuller lamented that on a macroeconomic level governments did not want a mass-produced housing market because it interfered with one of the state's big economic levers: labour building traditional housing. So, to see Canada's last remaining post-war Trend Houses cleaved by the wrecker's bulldozers signals the death of an ideal - affordable housing for all.

1. Rathburn Road, Etobicoke

   Posted by Owen Rogers  on  05/11  at  08:00 AM

2. Although keep in mind the context in which I framed the so-termed catastrophe, which is less to do with the merit of the house per se, than the too-elaborate-and-traumatic-to-describe-here circumstances which led to its demolition-a combination of long-term heritage neglect and short-term heritage malpractice-and underlying it all, which you neglected to point out, is the fact that the Trend House was a star attraction of Doors Open 2004.

   On that count alone (which is a measure of the raw hairtrigger power of an event Doors Open as a mass, popular awareness-builder, more so than raw listing and designation-and aside from “predestined” cases like Regent Park, this may well be the first demolished Doors Open landmark), what could have been a run-of-the-mill-ish architectural landmark loss takes on the undertone of scandal. Forget Inn On The Park, Bata, Riverdale-perhaps the last best comparable benchmark is West Toronto Junction Station, back in 1982.

   If, forseeably soon, there is a complete top-to-bottom overhaul and reform of Toronto’s heritage infrastructure (presently something of a remnant of Lastman days, and the city’s financial crunch hasn’t helped matters), it’ll be a hospital-waiting-room-death case like the Trend House to blame, more so than some of the more publicized losses. So, watch this space…

   Posted by  on  05/12  at  08:48 AM

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