University of Guelph Archives and Special Collections
Don Mills Village,Toronto – Project Planning Associates, 1953. Macklin L Hancock studied planning and landscape architecture under Walter Gropius at Harvard. His first major project led to international recognition as a landscape architect and town planner: beginning in 1953, he was a member of the team that designed the new community of Don Mills. Don Mills was the first planned and fully integrated post-war community in North America and became a template for urban developments around the country.
City of Toronto Archives
Project Toronto – Buckminster Fuller/Geometrics In 1968, Buckminster Fuller and his firm Geometrics was hired by local Toronto media outlets CFTO and the Telegram to prepare a study the looked at what Toronto could look like in the 21st century. Among other things the report recommended establishing a waterfront university in the form of a pyramid that would help create a link between the downtown and the lake.
CAUSE Our studio, Department of Unusual Certainties, is hoping to contribute to the dialogue of Canadian urban design identity through the establishment of an online resource called the Canadian Archive for Urban Speculation and Enquiry or CAUSE. This is an online digital archive of urban design projects that speculate on the Canadian urban condition. CAUSE will include a wide variety of projects throughout the country’s history and across its diverse landscape with the intent of displaying a rich legacy of speculative urban design in the nation. CAUSE is a reaction to a historical revisionism often found in the profession, which has reduced our understanding of Canadian urbanism to a narrow set of conditions – most notably with an anti- modernist and anti-suburban bias.
This bias has obscured many notable projects and ideas, leaving an impression of a nation with a very limited history of urban design. CAUSE aims to work against this by searching out and displaying the widest selection possible of urban design projects, making publicly accessible a body of work that is otherwise isolated in city archives and private collections. Some of the projects that have served as influences for CAUSE include Eberhard Zeidler’s 1968 Harbour City plan for the Toronto Islands, John Andrew’s Metro Centre plan for the Canadian Pacific Railway lands in Toronto, and Wells Coates’ Iroquois Town resettlement plan.Though unrealised, these projects are significant contributions to Canada’s output of urban design oeuvre which run the risk of being forgotten.
CAUSE will take shape as a website that presents itself as a simple database of projects. Source material will include original competition briefs, jury reports, presentation panels, photographs of models, presentation booklets all digitised and presented with document viewer application. Scanned source material, openly displayed on the site and making primary sources as publicly available as possible will allow for a rich diversity of interpretations on what constitutes Canadian urbanism. There are hundreds of projects out there that can add to our sense of what Canadian Urbanism is. DoUC needs your help in finding them and getting them online. If you have any material or suggestions for CAUSE please contact us at d epartment.of.unusual.certainties@gmail.com You can view a beta version of CAUSE at www.cargocollective.com/cause
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