homes that spin

in the it-had-to-happen department: dynamic skyscrapers featuring whole floors that rotate, from Italian architect David Fisher.

two towers are planned for 2010 – one in Dubai and one in Moscow – with movement powered by wind turbines between each floor. apartments will apparently be “vocally controlled”…which leads me to imagine standing in my living room & yelling “Move, now!” at my floor or windows. my home is my castle, indeed.

on the company’s website, inventor/designer Fisher says:

“From now on, buildings will have four dimensions, the fourth dimension is ‘Time’ to become part of architecture… Buildings in motion will shape the sky line of our cities.”

very nice. but surely he’s noticed that time is already a major fact of life for buildings. time, history, good old wear ‘n tear – making buildings interesting from day to day without any spin at all.

in the meantime, the company’s image links are currently broken on their website – which means i’ve pulled an image from the BBC website. but if Dynamic can’t get jpg technology uploaded today, i’m just a tad concerned about how 70-storey buildings are going to dance by 2010.

The Underpass Project

on Saturday I checked out the Underpass Project, at BIG, the Bloor Improvement Group’s new street festival. i thought their name might be a titch overambitious, but in fact no, the festival was really big, stretching from Christie Pits park all the way to Lansdowne, with shiatsu massage, art for kids, drumming circles, you name it…

but i was there because of a new art project just west of Lansdowne: the bleak south side of that underpass on Bloor is sporting a whole new look, thanks to Toronto artist Richard Mongiat. The Underpass Project is sponsored by the City of Toronto’s Clean & Beautiful committee, but Mongiat’s 400-foot minimalist mural is very different from the super-bright “cover-ups” i’m used to seeing in city murals.

Mongiat originally conceived the concept for the Dupont underpass; local artist & activist Dyan Marie convinced him to connect with the BIG festival project, which necessitated this new location. This underpass has a different type of wall from the Dupont underpass, which meant that Mongiat had to rethink his original idea. “These frames,” he says, pointing to the raised rectangles within the Bloor wall, “set up the design elements. I needed a visual throughline, a thoroughfare.”

He found his inspiration in the barren trunks of winter trees. “Like this neighbourhood,” he says, “dormant but coming to life.” His final design contrasts iconic grey tree trunks with other panels focusing on black ink buds, flowering.

There are four visual elements at play here: three from Mongiat–grey tree trunks, white wallpaper-style sworls, and close-ups of spring buds–and a fourth, surprisingly active element–the worn concrete of the underpass itself. “By keeping my work muted, black, white, grey, the wall really came through,” explains Mongiat. “Now, the weather, the rain stains become part of the design. The wall comes alive.”

the wall now seems to add to the conversation people have, on their journeys to & from home, through the neighbourhood.

i think it’s a fine metaphor for the place of artists in struggling parts of the city–not for art to paint over the history here, but to augment what’s already in place, to contribute & open up further dialogue.

[for an extra photo or two, check out my post at the blogTO]

Guy Maddin, dreaming

white block house: last night i went to see Guy Maddin narrate his film My Winnipeg, and what keeps turning around in my head is his obsession with the strangely-shaped building where he grew up. the experience of watching the movie feels like sharing someone’s dreams, the way a childhood home morphs into other characters, learned history, buildings that we’ve passed a thousand times on the street, fantasy and fears, becoming a remembered myth of home.

Maddin’s film reminded me that home isn’t always a good or easy thing to define. the word is loaded with emotional issues. is “home” a building–for Maddin, the white block house that contained two apartments and a hair salon, where he grew constantly bombarded with the smells of hair spray, the scent like “the inside of a purse”.

or is “home” a city, My Winnipeg, or my Paris, or my Dawson City? or maybe, most importantly, home is a state, a dream state, that we seek to create with home furnishing shops and, often, a Maddin-esque melange of truth and invention.

palmerston’s tiger

for the Taste of Little Italy fest over the weekend, the intersection of Palmerston & College was graced by the arrival of a huge inflatable tiger. the slide had rather a rough weekend – the poor cat kept getting rained out & being deflated due to high winds.

it’s not ever day your street gets decorated with a tiger the size of a house. made me think about all the buildings shaped like animals & odd objects that are scattered across North America…a restaurant the shape of a whale or the shape of an ice cream cone. but i’ve never seen any actual homes that are shaped like that. would it be wonderful or simply too surreal, to come home every day & walk through the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger (or whatever your whim required) as a front door?

instead we seem to have gone for lions as guardians, rather than entrances. there’s a whole collection of  international lions out in front of homes on Palmerston, including these Chinese lions (also known as Foo Dogs)

lions seem to be the most popular animal for guarding a home–they beat out the eagle as preferred icon, maybe because of the lion’s stupendous cross-cultural history as the king of the beasts. just as pillars were once used only on palaces & temples, but were eventually adopted for private mansions, lions too have stepped down from their pedestal.

maybe we’re inspired by the strange skinny stolen lion outside the Arsenale in Venice, or by New York’s central library’s Patience & Fortitude (Gotham City Insider describes them in a hilarious rant), and we’re subconsciously remembering these grander beasts when we see the lions in front of a friend’s front door.

most of our domestic lions actually look pretty good, better than swans or ballerinas or salamanders. but why not go whole-hog & install a front door with wide-open jaws? like this entrance to Gatorland in Florida…

although possibly it wouldn’t be all that comforting as the entrance to a home.

in praise of minimalism

It was a Victorian parlor maid’s nightmare, marked by the kind of decor involving the word “throw”. Throw pillows, throw covers, throw cloths… Next to throw, the operative word was “occasional”. Occasional tables, occasional chairs, occasional lamps; footstools, hassocks, stacked trays, wheeled teacarts, and enough card tables to start a gambling den.

- Florence King

i’m not exactly a minimalist, but sometimes i feel this way looking at the carefully-designed furniture store windows, crammed with apparently essential stuff…

get that cathedral out of my room

good news…cathedral ceilings are going out of fashion. that ubiquitous feature of recent suburban house design is one more victim of rising energy costs; new building plans are getting rid of the double-height “great room” syndrome. thank heavens. obviously, heating & cooling a room where all the energy goes straight up in the 18-foot ceiling is a big waste of money, but more importantly, from a home point of view, people are realizing that the noise booming around on those high ceiling angles does nothing for anyone’s peace of mind. not to mention that it’s a regal pain to change lightbulbs or dust or repaint…

it’s not that i hate all so-called cathedral ceilings; it’s more an issue of proportion and style. there are some great homes with double-height ceilings–exposed rafters in cabins, stripped-down industrial ceilings, and elegant modernist white boxes all come to mind–and i’ve loved the time i’ve spent living in a farmhouse that was missing most of its second floor, so lying on the living room sofa meant you could see stars out through a hole in the roof tiles. so i’m not saying we should abolish the whole play of double-height space.

it’s just that, all too often, cathedral ceilings top double-height great rooms, and the ceiling height is way out of whack with the footprint of the room. many cathedrals have been jammed into poorly-designed houses, giving us a cheap “wow” factor that quickly wears off as we’re forced to live within a drafty space. so “hallelujah” to the demise of the unnerving, un-homey, cathedral ceiling.

literary house #2

without actually meaning to, i’ve managed to visit most of Ernest Hemingway’s houses…i’ve walked past his first address in Toronto and i’ve led literary walking tours around his various addresses in Paris, so when i was in Key West recently, staying around the corner from his fabulous former house, i really had to visit. it’s a gorgeous house…this illustration gives you an idea of the amazing garden, the wide verandas surrounding the house on both floors, and at the back you can see the curved roof of the guest house – which is where Hem kept his study.

the house today is overrun with cats & tour guides (the cats are healthy; the tour guides might want to join AA en masse) but even in its current museum state, with little original furniture, the house still manages to give hints of what kind of home it might have been during Hemingway’s years here.

he wrote some of his best fiction, including as A Farewell to Arms, in this house, along with some less interesting nonfiction. it’s here that Hem started getting increasingly worried about his macho public persona, when in reality, the more fragile male characters in his fiction were probably more like the writer than he ever would have admitted.

this is his writing study – located in the upstairs portion of the guest house, which Hem connected to his bedroom by a rope bridge. i like this detail: the writer at play, going to work. the bridge also meant he didn’t have to go downstairs & interact with anyone before hitting the typewriter…now that’s a home detail that a writer can appreciate!

i hope Papa’s ghost isn’t here though – not only are the tour guides creepy, the bookshop is tucked out of the way on the far side of the swimming pool, and it sells a lot more postcards than books.

catching up

a few home-related articles from the Toronto press this week:

Emily Mathieu with 4 City Blocks in the Star (Toronto Star, June 5)

Justin Piercy on our vertical neighbourhoods (Toronto Star, June 5)

Katherine Laidlaw on a green cottage (Globe, June 6)

and Leah Sandals with one of the little things that improves the neighbourhood (Spacing, June 3)

the house was the message

“…a medium is not something neutral – it does something to people…It takes hold of them. It massages them, it bumps them around.” – Marshall McLuhan

i would argue that the same can be said of a house…

Canada’s own media guru Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980) lived last part of his life in Toronto’s gorgeous Wychwood Park, in a house was built by Eden Smith & Sons. Eden Smith was known for his commitment to the Arts & Crafts style, and the McLuhan house still has most of its original details.

McLuhan called the house “Walden II” according to his daughter, Elizabeth, and he insisted that guests walk through the surrounding park with him. He spent long evenings talking with friends over dinners (and his guest list included primer minister PET & others, so some of those nights must have seen some pretty darn interesting conversations). McLuhan liked to work in various rooms of the house, often lounging on the sofa in the wood-panelled living room, surrounded by books & papers (which apparently drove his wife Corinne to distraction, because of the mess).

Buildings from Eden Smith are always interesting, as Smith was committed to testing open plans, niches, and irregular entrance halls that were designed to take full advantage of the building’s location. And if you don’t simply want to take my word for it, and you’re feeling flush, you can get out there & buy McLuhan’s former house; his widow, Corinne, passed away this spring and 3 Wychwood Park is currently on the market. I really hope that whoever buys & lives in the house takes the time to consider McLuhan’s legacy…and hey, couldn’t the house get a plaque, too?

(a bit more about the park here)

(and for a wonderful post on McLuhan’s ongoing relevance re. the net, check here)