The Choice of Narrative In ‘The Illusion of Choice’ (25: Identity), Michael Panacci writes about the trend to market Toronto condominiums by borrowing iconography from other, foreign cities. He argues that much of this is a result of the economic situation surrounding the construction of new condominiums, where financing has to be secured prior to construction and all that can be sold is the immaterial idea of a place. While this is an accurate argument, I wonder if there is not more underlying this phenomenon. The fantastic conjuring used to sell real estate could latch onto any number of motifs, so it is curious that there is such a consistent use of other cities in the marketing of new condominiums in Toronto. Is this, perhaps, a particularly Canadian phenomenon? As a former British colony and current neighbour to the United States, there is a long history of imagining Canadian cities from a self-deprecating position, where ‘real life’ happens elsewhere, in the place where perceptions of value are formed. Think, for example, of how differently success in Canada is generally understood compared to international success. Of course, this is a futile point of view: a city imagined as this non-place can never be anything greater than an inadequate, if not fraudulent, version of the places it is looking to for validity. To see the value of our own cities, we have to understand them from the inside out, as specific real places. Panacci goes on to draw connections between the rise of the individual and the one-bedroom condominium unit, arguing that this form of housing “foster[s] an active separation from the public realm of the streets.” He makes an argument for different forms of dwelling, including collective spaces and new types of collective ownership, to counteract this trend and reconnect inhabitants to the places they live. I think this is indeed an important call for change but I would like to suggest that in addition to new “original living options,” we also need to encourage new myths about our cities, new ways of understanding and valuing them for what they are, rather than what they are not. Lisa Hirmer Guelph The making of an identity My earliest indentification with a place was in a village in rural Wiltshire, rudely displaced when I was moved in 1948 to Portsmouth, which had been a target for the Germans in WW2. My new neighbourhood was a bombed-out wasteland, my school was half in ruins and I crossed several bomb-sites to get to it. Homeless people lived under tarpaulins, sometimes sitting around an open fire as I passed by. My memory is of a desolate wasteland, ruins and a lot of misery. When I turned up at the school of Architecture, it was in one of the newest buildings in the city, completely surrounded by bomb craters and derelict town houses. It was like this in 1961 and for quite some years after that. Did this affect my identity? My surroundings had been seedy and run down for years, and had a significant impact on my outlook. I found the manicured residential districts of the USA and Canada too much: I gravitated to the wrong side of the tracks, to working class areas where the scale is smaller and, to me, more reassuring. Whilst working as an architect in the far north, I looked at iconic and emblematic forms as design solutions, discovering as others before me had, that the igloo really is the most amazingly sensible and environmentally fitting design form. Now I’m interested in even older things; very old in fact, ancient monuments and stone circles. There is a timelessness quite discernable in such places. I lose track of time hiking up Silbury Hill, an enormous artificial mound near Avebury in Wiltshire, whose engineering principles are still obscure. It was built 4500 years ago. There are places like this all over the world. It is the balance of things: quintessential purpose, beingness, timelessness, and connectedness that I sense, having gone full-circle, from a child at Stonehenge, our cottage on a ley line which joins all the ancient power spots, (and where the Christians later built churches all called St. Michael), along a straight line to St. Michael’s mount in Cornwall, to the Canadian arctic, and now to the Sami landscapes of Norway. Michael Barton Oslo
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Glimpses of Landscapes from a Car Window Ivan Hernandez-Quintela December 2011
Trying to make something out of the once-a-week trips to San Felipe del Progreso, a rural town two hours from Mexico City, where we’ve been supervising the construction of a
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