There's a reason art galleries are bright, airy spaces with little visual clutter. A simple step over the threshold takes you into a quiet, meditative world far removed from the frenetic pace of daily life.
Early on, designers of the Ontario government's massive Macdonald Block at Queen's Park (completed in 1968) realized that the wide, marble-lined corridors and many two-storey foyers would be perfect places to install original, commissioned artwork. In the process, they created what I consider to be one of this city's greatest modern art galleries. And it was there that I meditated, for two full days last month, on the future of modernist architecture.
I was attending "Conserving the Modern," a series of presentations and workshops by Parks Canada dealing with the rather new area of preservation and restoration of buildings from the 1940s to the 1970s. What came to mind wasn't that we continue to lose examples in the commercial world (the most recent being the former Bata Shoe headquarters by John B. Parkin Associates at Eglinton Avenue and the Don Valley Parkway), but rather the fate of residential architecture.
Heritage preservationists are slowly raising awareness of the fact that commercial and institutional buildings of the 1960s qualify as heritage structures. (Witness the lengthy fight to save the former Riverdale Hospital, built in 1963.) But that effort will be nothing compared with the coming one to save examples of residential architecture.
B.C. Binning house in West Vancouver, a new heritage battleground. (LYLE TAFFORD FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
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Believe it or not, there are a great many single-family homes, multi-unit apartment buildings and even whole neighbourhoods that will hit the radar of preservationists in the next few decades.
Of course, there will be lots of interest in anything by Toronto "names" such as Mr. Parkin, Peter Dickinson, Irving Grossman, Raymond Moriyama, Ron Thom or Jerome Markson. But as I was reminded in a seminar by Janet Wright, a historic sites planner in Calgary for Parks Canada, preservation is more often about conserving the "typical" rather than the "outstanding." In other words, in 2075, it will be more important to see an intact Don Mills streetscape than a one-off custom residence designed for a wealthy client.
The very real problem today, however, is convincing owners of those seemingly ordinary 1950s and '60s split-levels that forming a heritage conservation district would benefit our great-grandchildren. Any such move, they'd reason, would limit what they could do to the exteriors of their homes. If a homeowner's wood siding is rotting, the problem rattles around in his head with a hundred others. How ridiculous, then, to suggest that his home and street might, one day, be an art gallery of sorts, and to mandate that he use higher-priced wood siding rather than cheaper, maintenance-free aluminum.
However, that's the issue facing those trying to preserve modern architecture right now. Since it's a style that prided itself on a "less is more" aesthetic, it's those deceptively simple items that don't seem "olden timey" at all — curtain wall systems, mosaic tile installations, unpainted concrete walls, wood and stone cladding or roof profiles — that need to be preserved.
Slapping a mansard roof on a dwelling designed with a flat one is unacceptable in the preservationist's book. (One of the actual books most used by preservationists is the federal government's Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada.) Similarly, it's unacceptable to take down a polished limestone wall just because of a few cracked tiles, when a minimal intervention such as a "Dutchmen repair" — in which only the affected area is cut away and replaced — would do.
In addition, the postwar period was one of great experimentation, and systems may be failing in bizarre ways, partly because of unique marriages of materials such as concrete, steel and glass. Yet it's the way these materials combine that is often what's "character defining" in a heritage context.
Even Victoria Angel of the Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office admitted that out of the tens of thousands of buildings her department is charged with reviewing and, ultimately, protecting, the modern and late-modern examples prove most difficult. For her staff, it's "limited literature," "insufficient comparative examples" and even "lack of familiarity among committee members" that slow the process.
For the general public, she says, what's needed is an "expanded notion of what we mean by heritage."
In other words, the message needs to get out that yesterday's bas-relief frieze is today's spandrel panel.
Proof of Ms. Angel's sentiments can be found in the recent case of the B.C. Binning residence built in West Vancouver in 1941. Despite being designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1997, there was uncertainty about its future as Mrs. Binning's executors (Mrs. Binning died in May, 2007) threatened to put the house up for sale if a university or design school didn't take on stewardship. Hopefully, a recent meeting between the Land Conservancy of British Columbia and the home's representatives — as reported by Jessica Werb on straight.com last month — will bear fruit.
As I wandered Macdonald Block and meditated on stunning modern artwork by Harold Town, York Wilson, A.J. Casson, Sydney Watson, Jack Bush and others, I wondered how we'd preserve the ordinary, when even the fate of the extraordinary wasn't certain.
As my lunch break ended, I walked quietly back to my seminar room to find the answers.
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