Quote:
Originally Posted by flar
If I had three wishes, one of them would be to visit New York during that time period.
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I don't know about everyone else, but what I love about the pre-war Lower Manhattan skyline was just how audacious and unabashedly ostentatious it was. Those days are gone, but you can see the same mentality at work in Shanghai's Pudong skyline today.
I know, I know. Somebody's going to chime in now and tell me that the two are incomparable, because Shanghai's skyline looks like some gaudy Buck Rogers fantasy world, complete with balls on sticks and buildings with holes in them. But I also think that Old Europeans of the time probably thought that the idea of putting the Mausoleum of Helicarnassus on top of a skyscraper or using a 500 ft. facsimile of the Giralda or the St. Mark's Campanile to sell life insurance was ceaselessly tacky and affected.
Anyway, to bring this back to Canada, I find it a tad disappointing that we don't approach skyscraper building with the same madness as New Yorkers did 100 years ago and the Chinese do today. That's not to say that I want us to slavishly demolish our historic neighbourhoods and throw up the latest whiz-bang skyscraper, or that I obsess over the height of new buildings, but it's a bit deflating to realize that, despite the addition of millions of square feet of residential and office space in the last 12 years, Toronto's tallest building is still a white box from 1975; that Calgary's unprecedented office boom leads office developers to one-up each other by several feet, rather than by several hundred feet; that we fawn over PoMo skyscrapers like Scotia Plaza, because it was unabashedly opulent right down to the details on its staircase handrails, and every office tower built since the mid-1990s in Toronto has been some variation of a rather fat glass box with a rather pedestrian lobby.
Now, that's not to say that we haven't made impressive additions to our skylines. We have built the Bow and the L tower and there are some things to look forward to down the road like Telus Sky and the Vancouver House. But given the volume of construction in Canadian cities, bold statements like these come once in a blue moon. It doesn't have to be like this. Philadelphia might have built just 20 highrises in the past 10 years, but 2 of them were outstanding; New York city seems to have gotten a second [third?] wind, and is back to work throwing up 1,400 foot pencils into the sky. Even San Francisco, with a skyline that once seemed to have been planned by concerned mothers, is putting up bold new skyscrapers these days. What gives, Canada?
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