And the decline of cities
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This is the very first silk screen I made, under very primitive conditions (I didn't have the correct light, for one, so it was a bit of a trial and error to get the exposure). I was trying to reproduce the lovely gables of Victorian houses, with their lace-like carvings, and to make them into some kind of pattern. It was a time when I was studying juxtapositions of colors. I also tried to use the idea of musical notes to partly arrange the colors. It is harder than one thinks. Later on, this became quite a little enterprise with cards, tablecloths and runners.
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I was looking through a book on Toronto recently, which was simply a listing of buildings in the city worth recording, with photographs if available. I cannot remember the name of the book offhand. Anyway, I was struck at the time by the number of buildings that were demolished between 1960 and 1970, some without any reason. Most were destroyed to give way to things like wider roads or more modern buildings (usually high rises). It is incredible the number of buildings that were demolished.
Then I found this 2001 interview of Jane Jacobs, the American urbanist who came to Toronto in the 1960s and stayed. Here is what she had to say about the Victorian buildings that were had been destroyed:
Remember how people despised Victorian buildings earlier in this century? They were just ruthless with them. They were just thought to be automatically ugly and disgusting. Many wonderful, wonderful buildings were destroyed. Well, that was a big rejection of Victorianism. Not just the buildings. There was the feeling that it was stuffy, it was repressive.She got it exactly right. By demolishing the buildings, people thought you could also get rid of the ideas, the traditions, the history. One terrible way to destroy the history of a place (or to warp it) is to destroy its buildings.
My neighborhood has some of the most beautiful Victorian buildings I have ever seen. Parts of it are considered a Heritage Conservation District by the city of Toronto, and not to be tampered with. I wish they had done this forty years earlier. Who knows what they could have saved.
I've always maintained that buildings show us the outward manifestations of a city's psyche. Modern buildings are very hard to like. These days, we are being thrust with horrors like the ROM extension, an angular, dangerous-looking building.
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called the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal
Then there is the famous Turning Torso in Sweden's Malmö harbor. Another structure teetering on its building blocks. And look at what's now happening in Malmö. It's a hotbed for aggressive Muslim youth, intent on destroying the West. Malmö's Turning Torso was surely an omen, which no one listened to.
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An omen?
