Eyesore of the ages

[sabotabby]

Pop quiz: What's worse than letting starchitect wanker Frank Gehry crumple up a bunch of paper, 3D-render it, and plunk it in the middle of Toronto like so:



Letting him do so in the middle of a reasonably nice area of the city, in the process demolishing the quite lovely and human-scale Princess of Wales Theatre in order to shit out his architectural abortions.

Gehry apparently intends to TP several city blocks in the heart of the entertainment district. As you might know, I have a special hate-on for Gehry because he doesn't like wheelchair ramps. He represents the worst trends in contemporary architecture: utter contempt for usability and accessibility, aesthetic hideousness in the service of appearing avant-garde, and a complete disregard for the particular context of city spaces.

My first reaction was to projectile vomit. My second was to make sure that James Howard Kunstler knew about it ASAP. He is probably sick of people from Toronto writing him to tell him about our city's perverted love affair with monuments to poor taste and unsustainability by now. But really, is there any other city besides Dubai so slavishly devoted to uglifying itself?

Oh, and screw David Mirvish, too. He's apparently determined to fuck up his father's legacy as thoroughly as possible.

ETA: And Kunstler e-mailed me back, ZOMG! /fangirls

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

That's actually a model of it? I thought it was a mistake. Oh, wait, it is.

[sabotabby]

Mistake is an understatement.

Why do people think that this looks good? Did everyone just smoke a big bunch of crack?

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

It does look cool for extreme toboganning, though everyone would probably end up seriously dead due to toboganning off the edges of those snowy ramp things.

[sabotabby]

Knowing Gehry, they are made of sharp things. God forbid one of his buildings be used by an actual human doing human-type things.

[mimicucumber.livejournal.com]

Oh god, gehry's awful. I only semi liked one building, the serpentine pavilion. It's not just a question of aesthetics versus usability- it's a question of those aesthetics being hollow, literally. he creates vapid shells to be looked at from the outside, and being in those shells is no more aesthetic than an ugly 'functional' building.

[sabotabby]

Yes this. Though sometimes his interiors are less than functional. There's a reason why functional = box. His contortions result in unusable space.

[flummoxicated.livejournal.com]

Yuck! That' looks like an undergraduate architect student's very first project.

[sabotabby]

Everything he does looks like that. :(

[umadoshi.livejournal.com]

...what the HELL is that supposed to be? >.<

(Not the Princess of Wales. ;_; I love that theatre!)

[sabotabby]

...what the HELL is that supposed to be? >.<

Clearly Gehry took a dump on the city and got toilet paper everywhere whilst trying to clean it up.

And it's a pretty great theatre. I don't see why they'd tear it down.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

what the cocks

i do not understand

make him go away

ps who is david mirvish

for that matter who is james howard kunstler

[sabotabby]

David Mirvish is Ed Mirvish, a.k.a. Honest Ed's, son. Upon the senior Mirvish's death, he inherited all his property and immediately began planning to demolish all the nice old buildings and put condos on it.

James Howard Kunstler is a professional curmudgeon who writes about how North America is going to hell because our urban planning is too dependent on oil. He's best known for The Long Emergency, but by far his most entertaining contribution is The Eyesore of the Month, where he trashes shitty architecture.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

David Mirvish is the son of Ed Mirvish, of Honest Ed. He took family money and turned Toronto into the third largest theatre city in the English-speaking world; among other things they refurbished the Royal Alex to its current glory. Unfortunately they did this by producing stuff like Mamma Mia.

[xturtle.livejournal.com]

It took me around 20 years to get use to the plane crash on the East Bank of campus. I think I would need more to get used to that thing. At least the plane crash looks pretty at sunrise and sunset.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

What the ever-lovin' shit?

[sabotabby]

Oh eww. Why does he do this?

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

That one actually looks awesome!

[kchew.livejournal.com]

That's horrible. Really OMFG.

[sabotabby]

Isn't it just?

First it was Steven Moffat, now Frank Gehry fails (my) girlfriend test

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Gehry is behind the attrocity that half-digested the ROM, right?

I just showed Raven the photo and she said, quite pithily, "What is that?" I explained it was a proposal for a building in Toronto's theatre district, then began to rant about the stupidity of the architectural world, but she cut me off.

"It looks like toilet paper," she said, then pointed at a couple of the trees, "toilet paper in the garbage, with bits of cai [pin-yin Chinese for vegetables] scattered around in it."

Great minds, and all that ...

Meanwhile, as an expat, I sure hope Hogtown can find the wherewithal to extinguish this inhuman-scale monstrosity.

[sabotabby]

No, Libeskind did the ROM. Which is just as bad.

Raven is quite right.

[bitter-crimson.livejournal.com]

wowwww I don't think I'd read that other entry of yours about this dude & hating ramps. what a jerk.

[sabotabby]

He embodies the statement, "Christ, what an asshole."

[ginny-t.livejournal.com]

That's just fucking ugly. What the hell, Toronto. No. Just no. Show some common sense.

[sabotabby]

Oh, and there isn't the transit infrastructure to support it, either. So downtown is just going to get super-crowded with no way to get around and traffic/the subway will suck even more than it currently does.

[ironed_orchid]

Jesus fucking christ, that's like a parody of the scrunched up paper look. It literally looks like someone dumped some scrunched up paper and egg cartons on a model of a park.

[sabotabby]

It's the ur-Gehry building. Serious piece of shit.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

Okay, maybe I'm just missing a key piece of information here, but... What? What is this thing supposed to be? What is it supposed to do? Is it some kind of, I don't know, interesting and evocative sculptural thing to add interest to an otherwise dead area? Is it actually supposed to have any function at all? Is that white thing on the right part of it? Because I can't see the point of demolishing a usable building (let alone one that is actually nice to look at) in order to wrap the area in toilet paper.

(Which makes me suppose that the statement he's trying to make is probably, "Hey, Toronto, sorry Ford's been shitting all over you. Here, go get cleaned up." or something).

You know, if this thing gets made I will be very disappointed, and if there isn't an ongoing, grassroots campaign to use them as banners for various amusing slogans I will be disappointed in the extreme. Also I dare someone to go in with a trebuchet* and a buttload of mud and decorate it appropriately.

* More quiet and stealthy than a catapault. Can be set up and broken down quickly, as it relies on leverage and slings rather than torsion to power it, so a small group of people could spatter the TP quite appropriately in a very short of time and withdraw very quickly, without having to involve vehicles.

I hate crap like this. It's not awesome and avant-garde; it's useless and ugly. One could argue that any piece of artwork is fundamentally useless, I suppose (although in evoking strong emotion in its audience it does have a purpose), or that it is accomplishing what good art ought to do, in that it is successfully provoking an emotional response it in its audience; but when said emotional response is irritation and anger (especially when directed towards the arcitect/artist and the idiots who hired him, rather than, say, towards some unpleasant event which the artwork is commemorating) then I would say it has failed utterly. >:(

[sabotabby]

(Which makes me suppose that the statement he's trying to make is probably, "Hey, Toronto, sorry Ford's been shitting all over you. Here, go get cleaned up." or something).

Hahaha. Love it.

You know, if this thing gets made I will be very disappointed, and if there isn't an ongoing, grassroots campaign to use them as banners for various amusing slogans I will be disappointed in the extreme. Also I dare someone to go in with a trebuchet* and a buttload of mud and decorate it appropriately.

At the very least, there should be some Nuit Blanche video projections. I mean, it's screaming for it. Though I like your idea even better.

The thing is, while art can be useless (but shouldn't be!), architecture should always have at least some utilitarianism to it. If buildings can't be lived/worked/played in, what on earth are they for? Just plant some trees there otherwise.

[rackletang.livejournal.com]

Man, Gehry is something else. He's responsible for the wad of chewing gum next to the Space Needle here. Oh wait, that's supposed to be a guitar or something. At least now he has a(nother motherfucking) Chihuly installation nearby. Seattle has a special place in my heart for bad taste in public art and architecture, sorry.

[sabotabby]

Oh God, that building. So glad it's not in my city.

[kryss-labryn.livejournal.com]

ETA: And Kunstler e-mailed me back, ZOMG! /fangirls

Cool! What did he say? Can you share?

[sabotabby]

Don't see why not!

Thanks [sabotabby],
This is a serious reality violation. Skyscrapers are obsolete, but developers don't know it -- and architects won't clue them in because they make more money by maximizing floor-to-area ratio of a buIlding lot.

Just a few sentences, but it made my day.