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high rise development has occurred]
There's a new word that has been coined to describe the high rise
frenzy of cities: Skyscraperization
I've written that one of the charms of Toronto is the Victorian architecture. "Architecture" might be too grand a word to describe the pretty, and sometimes beautiful, Victorian townhouses, with their intricate gable lace work, but it is clear that when the British came here, they built their houses for a permanent stay.
Modern architecture's masterpiece, the skyscraper, has its own grandeur, and no other city demonstrates that better than New York. A recent television program on the evolution of New York City, We Built This City, shows that the city's construction, at least starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, was systematically planned, and was not some haphazard positioning of streets and tall buildings. Here is what the Discovery Channel website says about the construction of the city's streets:
The city was growing fast, characterised by the Randel Plan that constructed a grid work of streets that were numbered, rather than named.I think the main reason for the recent Toronto building spree of towers is more to accommodate a fast-growing city, due mostly to immigration, than any sense of design. There is no "Randel Plan" in this building frenzy. And we haven't had a housing bubble yet, but I think it will be a long, slow process here, which might take years to manifest itself.
Here is a post I wrote contrasting Toronto's quaint Victorian neighborhoods with the "collapsing architecture" that is now gracing the skyline. The destruction of these neighborhoods started sometime in the 1960s, where many were demolished to build ugly, sterile apartment buildings. I quote Jane Jacobs, who said:
Remember how people despised Victorian buildings earlier in this century? They were just ruthless with them. They were just thought to be automatically ugly and disgusting. Many wonderful, wonderful buildings were destroyed. Well, that was a big rejection of Victorianism. Not just the buildings. There was the feeling that it was stuffy, it was repressive.We have learned nothing, and are playing that all over again. Of course, this is the symptom of a bigger problem. The multicultural makeup of Toronto (Toronto is touted, with pride, as the most multicultural city in the world) provides no unified contemporary culture. Recent architectural designs in the city are mediocre, with little planning (described as "urban sprawl" by critics). The underlying intention is simply to accommodate the growing numbers of disparate people, immigrants, who simply don't care how the city looks, as long as it provides them with the amenities that they expect from a Western city. Architects are forfeiting their excellence, and ultimately their discipline, to side with city planners (since I suspect this translates mostly to increased revenue for the architects) whose primary objective is to accommodate these growing numbers of people.