In the Skin of a Lion in many ways paral- lels Roman Polanski’s equally mythic film, China Town. Ondaatje’s dream-like quality sets it apart from Polanski’s harder-nosed struggle over water supply in the creation of modern Los Angeles. Certainly there is a comparative reading in the privatised and violent nature of American birth as opposed to the civil service Canadian approach. But in the end there are the respective stories and their artifacts.
The pump house, in an elegant ballroom, is at the low- est terrace, nearest the water — an aqueous anteroom to the purification project further up the terraces. The alum tower marks the next step on the water’s path to purification. Water passes under the tower and coagulant is dropped into it before the underground pipe turns 90 degrees to approach the filter building on axis, a simultaneous beaux-arts compositional rule and a modernist functional diagram. Small particulates in the water adhere to the alum, sinking to the bottom of settling tanks. Clean water is then piped to the city. The tower could easily have been a simple metal tank, but is instead a vertical punctuation mark on a horizontal process. The functionally unnecessary top floor belvedere exists only to offer powerful views of Lake Ontario. The upper ground is dominated by the sprawling filter building, buttressed by administration towers that flank a monumental arched entry. An octagonal rotunda marks the crossing of the filtration building wings and the administration building. In the centre of the rotunda is a pylon providing
data on filtration rates, water capacity and time of day. Like the entire plant, this device only needed to be a prosaic piece of equipment, but instead is celebrated and elevated in an elaborately detailed stone obelisk. At every turn our expectations about water filtration are eclipsed by the exuberance of Pomphrey’s architectural ambition for mere infrastructure, almost as if Nicola Salvi and Pope Clement XII had re-imagined a Trevi Fountain to celebrate the arrival of water in the modern city. What of Ondaatje’s fascination with the palace of purification? It is possible that the Harris filtration plant is just one site for inventing a Toronto mythology. Perhaps Ondaatje’s novel is a single particle of alum dropped into raw lake water. With enough alum, maybe a movie or two, the ooze that settles from the raw water will become the material of rumours and tall stories. And while we wait for the stories to accrete, we celebrate the delivery of clean water. D
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