I find many London apartment towers are simply filing cabinets for people. Don't get me wrong, lots of these buildings are fine places to live. I especially like the ones with large, indoor pools. Still, viewed from outside, there is little to see.
I did a post on the apartment complex across from The London Free Press on York Street. I recalled how the Homes section fawned over the concrete towers. I recalled how one reader took the paper to task for not recognizing East Leningrad architecture when confronting it.
With my post I ran a picture of a Leningrad apartment complex proving the reader was wrong; Leningrad architecture clearly trumps those towers.
Since those York Street towers were built, quite a number of apartment towers have thrust their way into the skies above many London neighbourhoods. Some are more than concrete slabs, but many sport a cookie cutter look. The rule seems to be: Design once, build often.
In London one rarely feels an apartment building was constructed to take advantage of a site. One exception may be the apartment complex overlooking the Thames River on Riverside Drive at Wonderland Road.
Soon one of the most dramatic locations for an apartment building in London will be lost — Reservoir Hill. City staff are preparing geological and slope stability reports as they evaluate the site plan.
If the past is any indication, do not expect to be wowed. I live in southwest London and when I read the piece in the local paper calling the the Wonderland Road South commercial corridor a welcoming gateway into London, I groaned.
I drive that stretch of road and it is neat and tidy with lots of box stores. It is reminiscent of suburban developments right across North America.
The paper talked of gateway apartment buildings for the area. This rang bells in my memory banks. Mississauga held a competition for a gateway apartment tower. I found a picture of the winner.
So, what will be built on Reservoir Hill? What beautiful structure will grace that historic site? Do you really believe the new tower will bring delight with sculptural creativity?
Check the following apartments from around the world.
I've discussed this in the past: art. When I was attending art school, I came to believe that art was the creative aspect of a work and craft was the skill that it took to produce the work.
I've know painters who worked for a month or more on a piece only to paint it over. The creativity and skill just didn't gel. This might not have been obvious to the observer; An onlooker doesn't know what the artist intended but failed to create — but, the artist knows. The flawed piece might look awfully good and still be a big disappointment to the artist.
Photography is no different. The photographer sees a scene, like the one featured today, and sees light and dark, highlight and shadow, the push-pull of colour on the picture plane and the contrasting juxtapositon of texture, form and direction and even mood. Like painters, photographers do their best to get all the elements in the image working together to make the desired statement. And, like painters they sometimes fail.
The first thing that attracted my eye to this image was not the colour but the soft, falling branches of the weeping willow in the background. Those branches were the perfect foil for the bright fall foliage in the foreground. The bits of blue sky were an added bonus. The strong shadows and sweeping slopes of the small rises gave the image a strong base on which to build.
I wandered about hunting for the right angle and I had to wait for the sun return from behind some clouds to get the strong, directional lighting that attracted me originally. Pictures, even simple pictures, often just don't happen. They are created.
There's a lot to think about when shooting a picture. This image pulled together nicely. It took only a little cropping to arrive at the final result shown at the top of this post. Having a clear idea of what was wanted helped. Having a number of different interpretations of the vision (a number of pictures from different angles) also helped. And in the end, having a little serendipity on my side also helped.
Do you really think that painters, or sculptures, and other traditional artists don't also benefit from a little serendipity?
I've been following the battle between Quebecor/Sun Media and the CBC for some time but I hadn't formed an opinion on the positions of either media combatant until today. Today I read Brian Lilley's piece, "CBC starting to feel heat at its feet."
Lilley made me aware that the CBC was now aggressively fighting back against the angry claims of Quebecor/Sun Media, which feel that the Canadian broadcaster, with its government backing, has an unfair advantage when competing in the world of network television.
My curiosity piqued, I began googling about the Web. I found lots of posted pages claiming that Quebecor/Sun Media is a media hog slopping back funds from the taxpayer trough. Allow me to quote just one, this one from Macleans:
"Now why would the biggest success in Canadian broadcasting history
need even one cent of taxpayer money? Sounds like the kind of hard
biting question for Sun News, doesn’t it?"
Thanks Brian Lilley. Without your encouragement, I never would have read the stuff I stumbled upon. If just a fraction of the stuff I read was accurate, man, is Quebecor/Sun Media ever living up to its nickname of Faux News North.
Urban renewal, urban revitalization, whatever you call it, it is hard to come out against it. It just sounds so awfully good. You've got an area of the city, often the old "heart" of the city, the downtown core, that has fared poorly over the passing years. Buildings are in disrepair, businesses have deserted the area and crime, it is believed, has move in.
I'm retired and at my age I've lived through a lot of fine sounding, filled-with-promise, urban renewal schemes. Some I liked at the time and others had a false ring right from inception. A great many failed. My gut feeling it that the majority of urban renewal schemes fail but I can't say that for sure.
One thing that many of the urban renewal schemes share is cost; they are expensive. And many dip deeply into the public pocket to cover the cost. Like I said, I'm retired. I'm on a fixed income and anything that threatens to put my annual budget out of whack draws my attention and my ire.
Since moving to London, Ontario, I have felt that the city has been on a perpetual urban renewal binge. It hasn't always been the downtown core that has been the focus but there has always been a focus. A few decades ago East Of Adelaide (EOA) drew a lot of the attention. Do you recall when Dundas Street immediately east of Adelaide was ripped up and rebuilt as a wavy stretch of asphalt. Today we have a name for a stunt like this: Traffic calming.
That curving of Dundas St. cost the better part of a million bucks and it did anything but calm the neighbourhood. The area was in decline, that is why it was built. But that roadway became a focal point for the disaster that was the old EOA business district. In the end, the snaking roadway was ripped up and straightened. The cost approached a million bucks, again.
I could never see the connection between a wavy street and a successful department store, but the owner of Hudson's department store was a big believer in the curved street. Hudson's folded. The traffic may have been calmed; It slowed but it didn't stop --- at least not at Hudson's.
Today there is talk about putting in traffic calming measures in the downtown core. The city is examining the possibility of putting in what they are calling, incorrectly I believe, a Danish woonerf. London's not Denmark. I'm not going to say it wouldn't work. But, I'm not going to say that it will either.
The proposed woonerf has something in common with the former Galleria London, now Citi Plaza, popularity among a certain segment of city planners. But not all city planners are enamoured with woonerfs and pedestrian malls.
Randal O'Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and authof of "The Best-Laid Plans:
How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook and
Your Future," wrote in The New York Times:
In 1959, Kalamazoo, Mich., tried to help its downtown compete with
suburban shopping malls by closing a street to auto traffic and turning
it into a pedestrian mall. Over the next 30 years, more than 200
American and Canadian cities created similar malls.
Far from helping retail districts, most of these pedestrian malls
killed them. Vacancy rates soared, and any pedestrians using the malls
found themselves walking among boarded up shops or former department
stores that had been downgraded to thrift shops or other low-rent
operations.
Despite these failures, cities continued to create pedestrian malls
25 years after Kalamazoo’s initial experiment. In 1984, Buffalo closed
10 blocks of its Main Street to automobiles only to see its vacancy
rates increase by 27 percent and property values decline by 48 percent.
Eventually, most of these cities, including Kalamazoo, reopened
streets to auto traffic. Today few pedestrian malls remain, and the
handful that could be considered successful are in college towns and
resort areas.
I'd bet the sales pitches for all the failed pedestrian malls shared one thing, beautiful artist's conceptions filled with dreams.
Which brings me to the pitch for urban renewal in London. It may be hard to be against urban renewal but it is easy to distrust the artist's drawings depicting life in the reborn city core.
The dramatic Gateway Bridge is in the drawings but not in the plans.
One repeating visual motif in the urban renewal drawings it the new Gateway Bridge. It is a striking structure with a soaring, arching support and stainless steel cables dramatically holding the roadway above the forks of the Thames. It's nice --- a bit of a visual cliche, but it's nice. It is also not in the plans. I asked. It is just in the drawings as eye candy.
So, if we cannot trust the drawings, can we trust the other bumph accompanying much of the urban renewal campaign? This is a campaign clearly designed to get London taxpayers on board.
To a certain extent, I hope we can't trust them. The artist's conception of the SoHo development is, to my eye, boring. London can do better than tall apartment towers, much like the towers that presently dot the city.
We need more imagination. Maybe we could take some inspiration from Steve Jobs and his plans for a new Apple corporate headquarters.
A relief on the Hamilton-Wentworth district board of education building
The London Free Press features a couple of stories today on what two other communities, somewhat near London, are doing to revitalize their ailing downtown cores. Hamilton is stepping up to the plate with $20 million to show concrete support for the proposed McMaster Health Campus. When all the other municipal incentives are factored in, Hamilton may be on the hook for about $85 million in total.
This is good according to The Free Press and I can't argue there. I just don't have enough details. But there are Hamiltonians who are ready to go to battle against the proposal as it now stands. I was surprised to not see one word in The Free Press report on this opposing viewpoint.
The opponents have posted the following video and are working fervently to marshal support to save the building presently on the site. The opponents see the development as a win/lose proposition. They don't understand why the Steel City cannot shift the focus for the facility to some vacant land or, at the very least, towards the destruction of an undesirable, derelict building rather than demolish a perfectly good structure. This is win a new building and lose a good, older building. "Why is this necessary?" they ask.
Link to the Facebook site dedicated to the preservation of the Hamilton-Wentworth district board of education building.
If the past is any indication, do not expect to be wowed. I live in southwest London and when I read the piece in the local paper calling the the Wonderland Road South commercial corridor a welcoming gateway into London, I groaned. 
