BUILDING ON HISTORY

Saturday 24 January 09 — Sunday 14 June 09

FREE Public Opening Reception:
Friday 23 January 09 | 6pm – 10pm
235 Queens Quay West, Toronto

Canada's Goldsmith Borgal & Company Ltd. Architects, E.R.A. Architects Inc. and Taylor Hazell Architects Ltd. were invited to create installations in response to the of idea building on history.

The exhibition Building on History also features a selection of work from the photographic series Elegy for a Stolen Land by Peter Sibbald in response to his own reflections and questions posed by this idea.

The objective of this architecture gallery is to present exhibitions which will educate, challenge and question the thoughts and the ideas which inform contemporary architecture.

It is a multi-functional space which is able to present exhibitions, be a classroom and a meeting space for the discussion of issues relating to architecture.

Harbourfront Centre thanks the architecture advisory committee for their assistance: Valerie Gow, Margaret Graham, John Ota, Marco Polo, Lisa Rapoport, Scott Sorli and Tim Scott.

This exhibition space devoted to architecture is brought to you in part by the generous support of our donors: Core Architects Inc., du Toit Allsopp Hillier | du Toit Architects Limited, Kirkor Architects & Planners. We also acknowledge the generous support of theCanada Council for the Arts.

Special thanks

Found Toronto

E.R.A. Architects Inc.

Take 2

Goldsmith Borgal & Company Ltd. Architects

The Redemptorist Project: Studies in Risk, Conservation and Architectural Response.

Taylor Hazell Architects Ltd.

Elegy for a Stolen Land

Peter Sibbald

Detail of the installation, Found Toronto, 2009
E.R.A. Architects Inc.
Photography: Tom Bilenkey

Found Toronto

E.R.A. Architects Inc.

When we walk through the streets of Toronto it's sometimes hard to know what's old and what's new. Is this a historic building, or is it new and just looks old? The city is constantly evolving and growing so it can be hard to tell what "Old Toronto" was like, and what parts still exist.

As we celebrate Toronto's 175th birthday in 2009 we can look at the 1858 Boulton Atlas — one of the earliest city maps. Found Toronto recreates that map on a massive scale, letting you stand in front of the city that was and, if you use your imagination, take a walk down those early Victorian streets. Found Toronto lets us see how the old Toronto connects to contemporary Toronto, and shows us where our history may lie, both out of sight and in plain view.

Team: Adriana Balen, Andrew Choptiany, Andrew Pruss, Ben Huntley, Chris Lawless, Edwin Rowse, George Martin, Graeme Stewart, Jan Kubanek, Jeff Hayes, Jennifer Drinkwater, Jessie Grebenc, Joey Giaimo, Kerri Goudie, Kirsty Bruce, Lindsay Reid, Matt Blackett, Matthew Somerville, Michael McClelland, Philip Evans, Robyn Huether, Scott Weir, Sonya Tytor

Collaborators: Shawn Micallef, Stephen Otto

Material Collaborators: Astley Gilbert and special thanks to the Toronto Public Library

E.R.A. Architects Inc.

Take 2

Goldsmith Borgal & Company Ltd. Architects

In our consumer driven society, reusing buildings is not only environmentally responsible, it is also culturally desirable. Architecture is the most enduring art form of mankind. If time and utility abandon it, creative transformations are required to re-animate, re-connect and re-weave these elements back into our urban and social fabric. Their beauty, history and cultural significance layer our cities with meaning and wonder.

Reusing elements from the previous exhibit and drawing on both modern and historic references for our inspiration, this installation demonstrates the essential process of re-ordering our built environment and re-connecting with our past. Re-ordering is essential for the functionality of the space: the 'fit' of its new use. Re-connecting makes reference to the human experience, perception and understanding of our natural and manmade environments, and the intersection of the two.

In order to better inform and inspire others, we invite visitors to share their thoughts on their personal journey in time and space as facilitated by these exhibits.

Team: Christopher Borgal, Claudia Gu, Allan Killin, Gillian Haley

Material Collaborators: Donald Chong Studio, Clifford Masonry Limited, Midtown Reproduction Services

Goldsmith Borgal & Company Ltd. Architects

Detail of the installation, Take 2, 2009
Goldsmith Borgal & Company Ltd. Architects
Photography: Tom Bilenkey

Detail of the installation, The Redemptorist Project: Studies in Risk, Conservation and Architectural Response, 2009
Taylor Hazell Architects Ltd.
Photography: Tom Bilenkey

The Redemptorist Project: Studies in Risk, Conservation and Architectural Response.

Taylor Hazell Architects Ltd.

Building is a defining activity for our species and we have done a lot of it. History is a specific form of documentation whose purpose is to convey cultural content and commentary on our human condition. Our times, that reach of living memory, have presided over the most appalling destruction of the built world where over 50 percent of mankind's historical architectural heritage has been destroyed. Much of this has been with a form of violence and banal disregard that defies belief. The effect on the natural environment and ecosystem is, as we know, no less catastrophic. It would be delusional to regard our efforts as architects as independent of these forces. Indeed it is exactly how we respond to this condition and conservation in particular that will determine the nature and extent of our recovery.

Our exhibit examines these issues through the lens of a single project — an incomplete work done in joint venture with Montgomery Sisam Architects. It involves the design of a monastery on an existing site in downtown Toronto for the Redemptorists, a Catholic order that has occupied the site since 1850. The exhibit raises questions about the role of institutions as transformative forces in our city, its sustaining culture and architectural response.

Team and Collaborators: Taylor Hazell Architects, Montgomery Sisam Architects, Clifford Restoration Limited, Paisley Brick and Tile and special thanks to the Redemptorists of St. Patricks Church, Toronto.

Taylor Hazell Architects Ltd.

Elegy for a Stolen Land

Peter Sibbald

Ontario-based documentary photographer Peter Sibbald was invited to exhibit a selection from his photographic series Elegy for a Stolen Land as part of Building on History. Using Southern Ontario as a personal ancestral starting point, this selection shows evidence of the dramatic shifts throughout history of how humans have constituted the meaning of land.

This component of the exhibition of architecture and building on history is presented by the Visual Arts at Harbourfront Centre as part of an ongoing interdisciplinary focus.

Elegy for a Stolen Land

Finally we just filled it with our will, so that the land came to look tired in its heart: almost empty but crammed with human intention, sick with a sameness that came from us.

— Tim Lilburn, Going Home, (Anansi, 2008)

Forced by food shortages to emigrate, six generations ago my Scottish ancestors settled in Southern Ontario, an area that for millennia, and until not long before, had been homeland to successive waves of First Peoples. That land would become part of what is officially called the "Greater Golden Horseshoe," source of 20 per cent of Canada’s wealth, including, until recently, over one third of our country’s class 1 farmland. On a thousand square kilometres of what remains, double Toronto’s current footprint, the government’s 2005 plan — Places to Grow — would add 3.7 million people by 2031.

When I moved home after years of city life to raise a seventh generation of my family in that place, the sheer rapaciousness of human activity in Ontario’s countryside — the naked erasures of both heritage and our capacity for a secure, local food supply — compelled me to investigate.

Markham, Ontario. Real Estate Billboards.
Approx. 43°54'7.53"N 79°14'27.90"W,
Facing south, circa May 5, 2005.

Real Estate Billboards pertaining to a development of roughly 2,500 homes on and adjacent to the pioneer family farms of James and Adam Clendenen.

© Peter Sibbald, 2005.
Image courtesy of Artist.

My approach to documentary eschews the notion of objectivity, which is but a cultural value, a conceit. Intrinsically I document what is there, but the act of documenting can only be a reaction mediated through filters. My title for this work, born of settler guilt, sets out my bias concerning North American history as a frame.

For a while I focused on "land use," which so circumscribes the modern Euro-American philosophy of land-human relationships that one could easily assume it was always the only meaning of land: distinct and separate from humans, implicitly to be used or planned. Here, land that had been cultivated by people like my ancestors was to feed us no longer. But in 2005, the accidental exposure of a pre-Columbian Huron-Wendat ossuary on a construction site in Vaughan vaulted me beyond the limits of that meaning. In this same place, people had lived undivided from their earth, as indeed had earlier peoples in the Old World of my ancestors’ ancestors. What was the journey from "earth mother" to "real estate"?

Eventually that ossuary was left in situ, fortified and protected. Meanwhile, with Ipperwash and Caledonia, politics began rising from the ground. I learned that contemporary archeologists characterize their excavations as "controlled destruction," that they have mapped this region extensively, and that their maps are so dense with findings, it is as if one had repeatedly fired a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with red dots — each an archeological site — into those areas most actively planned and developed. I am not permitted to photograph those maps: proprietary information: wounds. The interests who commission such work don’t want the public thinking about what or whose village, farmstead or gravesite was disturbed or destroyed, or lies still beneath our houses, malls and industrial parks. Such questions, however, have become instrumental to my practice. Innocent sounding terms like "land use" and even "landscape" become suspect as subtle instruments of dissociation of humans from land.

Stouffville. Dewatering.
Approx . 43°56'57.22"N 79°15'7.87"W,
circa October 2, 2005.

Dewatering to extend a large sewer,
also known as "The Big Pipe" to accommodate
massive growth of Stouffville's secondary plan.

© Peter Sibbald, 2005.
Image courtesy of Artist.

Retracing routes across decades, one’s mind and memory play tricks. Time and space warp as forests, fields and creeks — which seemingly were there only last week—give way to suburbs, malls, and highways. In an apparent afternoon, 11,000 years’ accumulation of topsoil is scraped and bagged for sale at supermarkets, while the secrets it has long concealed are boxed, catalogued and deposited in remote basements, merely pocketed, or disappeared through wood chippers. GPS coordinates are the best way I can keep track of the places I’ve been; yet they convey falsity, both in solace and in their implication of accuracy. For place is a thing of the senses — the foot and the eye — and landmarks on the heart. Returning to a coordinate, the place is gone. And while chasing light and shadow — whose conjunctions sometimes feel like rips in a metaphysical plane hovering near the wind — drums beat, campfire smoke rises, and the growl of a prehistoric bulldozer drowns out the husky ringing of drying corn.

— Peter Sibbald
Jackson’s Point, 2008

For over 20 years photo documentarian, Peter Sibbald has photographed for many of the world’s most prestigious magazines.

petersibbald.com

Part of an ongoing work, Elegy for a Stolen Land, supported by The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Welcome, Hope Township, Ontario.
Tombstones, Walker Family Cemetery
43°58'11.34"N 78°21'40.14"W,
facing North, circa November 3, 2005.

Pioneer cemetery of the Walker family, in the unprotected
countryside immediately outside the Ontario Greenbelt near
the eastern edge of the Greater Golden Horseshoe,
west of Port Hope.

© Peter Sibbald, 2005.
Image courtesy of Artist.

Visual Arts at York Quay Centre

ARCHITECTURE | Winter 2009

BUILDING ON HISTORY

Found Toronto

Take 2

The Redemptorist Project: Studies in Risk, Conservation and Architectural Response.

Elegy for a Stolen Land

Found Toronto

E.R.A. Architects Inc.

Take 2

Goldsmith Borgal & Company Ltd. Architects

The Redemptorist Project: Studies in Risk, Conservation and Architectural Response.

Taylor Hazell Architects Ltd.

Elegy for a Stolen Land

Peter Sibbald