Daniel Libeskind's well-known cocktail-napkin doodle of what has become the Royal Ontario Museum's Crystal addition is both dangerous and instructive. It's dangerous because it suggests that the journey from napkin to finished work required no other hand than Mr. Libeskind's, while nothing could be further from the truth. Despite this, it's instructive because it shows that original pie-in-the-sky concepts are often scaled back before construction begins because of budget constraints or logistics.
In the Toronto Archive's new exhibit, "A Work in Progress: Preserving Toronto's Architectural Record," curator Patrick Cummins has successfully addressed both issues.
Using the vast wealth of material at his fingertips — conceptual sketches, renderings, correspondence between architect and client, blueprints filed with the city, landscape plans and post-construction photographs — Mr. Cummins demonstrates architecture's collaborative nature by telling the stories of individual buildings, from their concept to completion.
"I did want to try and get away from just sticking pictures of buildings on the wall," he says.
Mandel C. Sprachman’s 1970s conversion of the Imperial Cinema, constructed in 1919. (TORONTO ARCHIVES)
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While some of the material has been in the city's hands for decades simply because of its doing business with architects, other things are drawn from five major collections recently donated to the archives by private firms.
Buildings — both "commonplace" and "monumental" — by Howard D. Chapman, Eric W. Hounsom, Mandel C. Sprachman, Irving D. Boigon and George A. Robb are featured, but, wherever possible, the names of other players are included.
Mr. Chapman's Woodland Acres (with partner Len Hurst) — a pair of round seniors' apartment buildings built for the city near the Warden subway station in the 1960s — are shown to have started life as a simple pencil sketch. And the playful curves of sexy Riverdale Hospital (now Bridgepoint Health and slated for demolition) are reflected in landscape plans by highly regarded landscape architect George Tanaka, plans that Mr. Cummins considers "vital" to the project.
"The thing about architecture is that it's a group enterprise," he stresses.
A sketch of Mr. Hounsom's 1949 University Theatre on Bloor Street shows what it looked like before it was reduced to a soulless, tacked-on facade for a Bloor chain store a few years ago.
Also interesting are the various incarnations of the mid-20th-century Weston Municipal Building by Mr. Hounsom and then-partner Jan Albarda. Mr. Cummins says it started out as a "bold Bauhaus design" and, through a series of revisions, was watered down, and down again, until all that got built was "generic 1950s government architecture."
Next up is Mr. Sprachman's conversion work on the Uptown (1920) and Imperial (1919) theatres during the birth of the multiscreen era of the early 1970s, which, in less sensitive hands, might have meant their demise. At the time, he was quoted as saying: "If I didn't step in, those grand old opulent cinema temples would be torn down and replaced with parking lots and high-rises. What I do is to give old cinemas a new lease of life."
His blending of old opulence with new "pop" designs made it possible for the Imperial Six to be completely restored — becoming the Pantages (now the Canon) — in the late 1980s.
Contrasted with these large projects was his fire hall standardization work for Scarborough in the 1960s, and the surprising outbreak of NIMBYism (not in my backyard) in North York over his design for another fire hall in the 1980s.
Etobicoke's Robert J. Smith Apartments by Mr. Boigon represent a shift in thinking about seniors' housing. According to the exhibit text, prior to the erection of this complex in 1966, "seniors were not regarded as active community participants," and therefore were "housed in geographically isolated projects."
Mr. Boigon changed that by incorporating a communal dining room and recreation areas in the design, which, surprisingly, ignited a newspaper campaign lobbying for widespread adoption of these amenities in all future city-funded seniors' housing.
While Mr. Robb's Shell Oil Tower on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds is his best-known work (and this city's greatest modernist loss, in my humble opinion), it is his original, unbuilt design for the Guildwood Community Presbyterian Church that's most striking. Its soaring hyperbolic paraboloid roof structure would have cost an additional $50,000, however, and was scrapped in favour of a more conventional A-frame design.
Rounding out the exhibit are designs attributed to the "city architect."
Among them are plans for public washrooms (including the 1921 design for one that still stands at the eastern end of the Bloor Street viaduct), the gorgeous Symes Road incinerator, as well as park shelters.
Blueprints of many commercial buildings, walk-up apartments and craftsman-style semidetached homes from the early 20th century are also included (most by workaday architects who've been forgotten), and many feature annotations by city hall staff requesting changes or deletions. While fascinating as unintentional pieces of art, they are doubly so when one considers that these documents were never meant to be seen by anyone other than city employees. "Blueprints were a transitory record," Mr. Cummins says.
Many of the multifaceted stories behind these buildings would have been transitory too if not for the good work of the Toronto Archives. Yet, getting researchers — professional and amateur — to harness the facility's "range of records" that document the journey from concept to finished building remains problematic, Mr. Cummins says.
"Where's the book on art deco Toronto?" he asks. "Whenever people talk about art deco they're talking about two or three buildings."
Hopefully, this wonderful exhibit will inspire such a book … and many others.
A Work in Progress: Preserving Toronto's Architectural Record runs throughout 2008 at the City of Toronto Archives, 255 Spadina Rd. For more information, visit www.toronto.ca/archives.
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