THESIS NARRATIVE
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Typology: Subway Design
Part One: Fall 2018
Part Two: Spring 2019 (Coming Soon)
Toronto is a faceless city. It isn’t the Euro-American hybrid that Montréal successfully grips. It doesn’t have the natural beauty of the coastal city of Vancouver. Chicago and New York both grasp a grunge aesthetic that is specific to their long history. Toronto doesn’t have an image when compared to other cosmopolitan cities.
Toronto is possibly one of the bleakest cities in Canada. It is clear that functionalism silenced the populous city, prioritizing the algebratization of their people and architecture. Toronto has created a new language, a triumphant voice for science, technology, and businesses. A poetic vision of the physical world was pushed aside, seen as an illegitimate aspiration for knowledge. It is an obvious loss of human intimacy.
In a city that has a metro population nearing six million people and housing over two hundred languages, Toronto has a celebrated population. These humans create the city, they create the language. But language is now devalued, it fails the human experience of communicative settings for action in the present.
This loss of language is due to cities, they have stopped being articulations of ritual spaces; they have had a shift towards movement, mere circulations. In the book, Timely Meditations by Alberto Pérez-Gómez, he quotes, “Circulation of fluids, such as air, fresh water and sewage for hygienic purposes, circulation of goods for commerce and consumption, and circulation of people…” (Gómez 116). Humans today are seen as a commodity. We are objects.
Seeing humans as simple objects causes a fall in public space and a sterilization of language. The spoken word can’t be understood by mere letters and words or figures and numbers; spoken word is pregnant with meaning that is grasped with the texture of linguistic gestures. A hesitation, a simple stutter, or a change in volume can change the meaning of what was spoken entirely. Every expression is seen as a trace, a degree of opacity and given to the person with transparency. These intimate gestures can be experienced through the frozen gestures of public space.
Public spaces should be particular to a specific culture that is embodied in stories while projecting imaginative thinking that enriches life and values. These architectural spaces enable human freedom by revealing the limits associated with particular human actions. Gomez quotes, “This intersubjective and emotional space of face-to-face communication is crucial for human self-understanding” (Gómez 113).
Possibly the only space where humans can see each other as humans is within public spaces, but public spaces are in danger. In fact, Richard Sennett, the author of The Fall of Public Man, points out that the fall of the public space is due to the fall of the Augustan Age, a time when the term res publica, or public affair, was defined. Spaces are either owned by the state or by the citizen, which is translates to res private. A public space is not owned by your family or friends, but is a shared space, joined together by people. In Roman terms, this space was called a Forum Magnum.
These forum spaces were scattered all over Italy and similar plazas throughout Europe. Public space functioned as a marketplace, a social gathering place, a space for social activities. The psyche of the people in Rome was level. You would go out in the world, discuss politics and interact with people then go home to your personal, religious transcendence.
It wasn’t until seventeenth century when society took on the definitions of “public” and “private.” Sennett quotes, “’Public’ meant open to scrutiny of anyone whereas ‘private’ meant a sheltered region of life” (Sennett 16). It is extremely hard to find public spaces in the modern age. Even if you linger in a park, that park could be considered private space.
In the year 2018, we are still stuck in the nineteenth century era that is surrounded by fear. There is a standoff between moralities in public space. We create this tension between our inner beings and the space we occupy. There needs to be a blur between the concrete outer world and our inner world. Our bodies and the natural world must negotiate, a convergence of reality and fantasy.
Weston paraphrases the book Nadja in her essay Surrealist Paris. André Breton, the author of Nadja, starts his book with the question, “Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’” (Breton 11). Breton, also the narrator of the book, is taken on a ten-day journey following his phantom-like guide named Nadja.
We are transported to this gloomy October afternoon, an uncertain world that is connected with spatial and temporal meanings. October can metaphorically mean regeneration, nature starting over, or it could blatantly mimic death. These associations between human definitions and the natural world is extremely surreal and intimate.
The triangle, the shape of the park that Nadja and Breton sit, has numerous connotations. It could reference a sinister occult, an alchemical work, or even sexual meaning. The city is dramatic because it mimics human characters, consequently, this is why Breton falls in love with Nadja. Her vision of the world provokes Breton, whom is in love with her storytelling and memories of Paris. He despises her as an ordinary being but loves her for her memories. He desires her. Breton quotes, “Don’t I love her? When I am near her, I am nearer things which are near her.”
Cities are dreamed up beings, we desire them. Just like how Breton desires Nadja, these desires are memories. Cities are already familiar to us, they are measurements of its space and the events of their past. The rules within cities are absurd, their perspectives are deceitful, and everything conceals something else. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, we are taken on a journey through fifty-five fictional cities. But cities do not tell their past. “… but contains it like the lines of a hand… “(Calvino 11). The modern city leads you through it without a story line, a city without being discovered.
Marco Polo, the main character in Invisible Cities, who is considered the storyteller, repeatedly tells his experiences throughout the cities. The city of Zobeide, the white city exposed to the moon as if it was built from a dream. The city of Hypatia, a city that Marco Polo considers a trap, is a city surrounded by marigold fields and blue lagoons where crabs bite the eyes of the suicides at the bottom of the lake.
Marco Polo quotes, “… in Hypatia, the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbor then but climb the citadel’s highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by? There is no language without deceit” (Calvino 48).
Calvino quotes, “Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist” (Calvino 19). We see these cities through redundant memories, repeating signs that relive our past experiences. It is all left for Marco, the commuter, the tourist, the voyeur, to create the plot and to create a journey. Calvino’s novel does not critique architectural settings an atmosphere; he critiques how we should live.
In the modern city, there is a loss in civility; a loss in humanity, public life, and personality. This is all caused by the overall loss in civility. Sennett defines civility as “… treating others as though they were strangers and forging a social bond from a social distance” (Sennett 328). Incivility is burdening others with oneself. It is the decrease in sociability with others, a burden of personality. People become uncivil when they need others to enter into their daily traumas of their own lives. They invest little interest in others.
Public spaces are in jeopardy, where can the modern human meet with others? Public transportation is possibly the only place left where people are forced to be amongst strangers. Subways are of another world. You are forced to descend into the depths of the city; the concrete labyrinths that force you to move through the rapid-transit maze, negotiating through the movement of the body. Subways challenge out ability to keep to ourselves; we look around trying to pass the time, but we meet our eyes with someone else; a lost stranger may ask you for directions; we may get up and move so an elderly person can sit; you may even have to push people out of the way to exit. Subway stations have an animalistic atmosphere.
No matter how hard we want to keep to ourselves, we are forced to interact with the passengers. It may not happen during every train ride, but it will happen. Subways create this community of passengers, there is a mutual ground that everyone shares, a sense of participation, just like that of the Roman Forum.
The essence of the forum has disappeared. Modern society now pressures their citizens to follow a specific moral code; people must follow a certain religion, a specific way of believing. This new interpretation of pubic space has bad associations in modern times.Privatization is on the rise in some areas and in developing, industrialized worlds, these symbolic spaces are translated as repressive political and economic spaces
This may be hard to wrap our heads around, since most of us grew up in western society, but public spaces can come off as dangerous, especially where activism is shunned. There are so many examples throughout history that shows how public space have turned dangerous for the common citizen. In the eighties, we had the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing that left hundreds dead.
In 2014, we saw demonstrations erupt in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, that shook not only the Ukrainian city of Kiev, but much of the world. When people don’t have a space for free speech, we lose our democratic human nature and the values of public space.
The deformation of public space has left it hard for the commuter to create an intimate experience. There is a confusion between public and intimate life. Sennett defines intimacy as warmth, trust, and an open expression of feeling. When avoiding eye contact, how are we to gain a trust for the strangers around us? We simply can’t.
We have a need to keep our individualism locked inside our privacy. We dare not show our true selves in public. We don’t experience individualism, but instead we feel anxiety. A nervous quest to find our personality; an adaptive and stable system that absorbs socio-emotional traits. The intimacy in public space has drastically deformed. The most intimate of personal experiences, physical love, has changed the most throughout the ages. Sennett says, “Victorian eroticism involved social relationships, sexuality involves personal identity” (Sennett 7).
Sexuality isn’t an act, it can’t be a physical being; instead it is a state of being. A human cannot master sexuality, it is ever changing and expanding the more we experience. The physical act of love only follows as a passive result of two people feeling intimate with each other. Sennett goes as far as saying this sex revelation is a new “slavery” that substituted the old. I’m not saying we all should go out and have sex in public. But Sennett is trying to say is that we should find intimacy and become comfortable with our sexuality in public spaces.
You lose yourself in the subway. The sensuous rhythm of the train, the lost track of time, the lost sense of distance, subways bring out the peep show devil in you. But who cares? We may never see these strangers again physically, but our memories may hold onto these intimate events that public spaces create.
I want people to dream about the subways just like how Poliphilo dreams of Polia through an intimate journey. The cultish book of Hypnerotomachia Polifili is about an obsessive search for love; a false love that is all within a dream. Poliphilo starts his dream, walking through a threatening dark forest and describes all of the monuments he passes: pyramids, obelisks, the ruins of classical buildings, the ornamentations on buildings, and so on. It is important to remember that this was the first narration of architectural intentions through distinctive wood cuts, as shown throughout this presentation.
Hypnerotomachia conveys the presence of erotic space, an emotional space. Poliphilo gets nursed back to health with the encounter of five nymphs, depicting the five senses, that sexually arouse him. Walking throughout the forest, Poliphilo chose to enter the gate of love, vita voluptuaria, where he meets Polia. The two “lovers” soon witness a sacrifice to Priapus; the god of fertility.
After they witness this sacrifice, Poliphilo and Polia enter the “Temple of Love,” which is a perfect circular building of great beauty. This temple was dedicated to the god Venus, who is the god of sex, beauty, and fertility. They wander together throughout the fairy-tale-like setting. When they embrace with happiness, Poliphilo wakes up from his dream, alone.
Alberto Perez- Gómez from his book Polyphilo: The Dark Forest Revisited, quotes “This motion of the poetic imagination allows the modern hero to “inhabit” the diverse works and “deobjectify” them, extracting a philosophical and ethical lesson for the architect of the future.”
In Gómez’s interpretation of Hypnerotomachia, his book Polyphilo: The Dark Forest Revisited, he takes us on a modern interpretation of Polihilo meeting his lover Polia. But instead of a forest, we are transported within the vessel of a plane. We are the commuter.
The subway rush hour is packed with mysterious and alluring strangers. We wait patiently for our train to arrive as we slowly encroach on the yellow line dividing the platform’s safe space with the deadly train tracks as people push from behind. We see the businessmen on their phones, students with their heavy backpacks longing to go home, the lovers kissing in the corner, and the tired families with their screaming children. We wait. We wait for the train, we seek out our friends, our family, but they’re not with us. We are alone, yet still within a community. Sennett quotes, “The crowd is man the animal left off the leash” (Sennett 369). When we are in a community, we are being real.
Privatization has ruined a sense of public space, which is clear in the Bloor-Yonge station. When entering this station, you don’t know what you are in. Did we enter a mall? Where is the subway station? Bloor-Yonge focuses too heavily on capitalizing off their commuters. There are six entrances to the Bloor-Yonge station, but only one allows you to directly enter the subway station. Five of the entrances force the commuter to enter either through the Hudson Bay Centre or the Xerox Centre. These two buildings converge into one large shopping mall with offices above the department stores.
The merging of public transportation and shopping is nothing new, it isn’t a terrible idea either. But it does disregard the sense of public space. I want there to be a separation between the private and the public. The hallways of a mall cannot be considered as a public space, it is a space for circulation. A space made for movement and nothing else.
Gómez quotes, “We interact more with machines than with other human beings, and this results in narcissism, alienation, and the incapacity to grasp a sense of purpose for our actions…” (Gómez 114). We need to interact with humans; if we disregard the human, the result is in violent expressions of nationalism and ethnocentric behaviors. Privatization encourages a narcissistic attitude.
In contrast, the St. George station is far different than the Bloor-Yonge station. Situated north-east of downtown Toronto, St. George is solely a station. There are no department stores selling the fancy wine or the finest cosmetics. This station sits on the edge of the Annex community and the edge of downtown Toronto. Located near the Bata Shoe Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the University of Toronto, St. George serves a heavy residential, tourist, and student ridership. Technically, this station already serves as a drab public space.
It can be heavily improved though, since it still only sees humans as objects, a product of circulation. These stations are the heart of the TTC. When riding the subway in Toronto, you have to cross paths with either the Bloor-Yonge Station or the St. George Station to get anywhere. If you want to get to downtown, Scarborough, or Etobicoke, you have to either change subway lines or pass through them to get to your destination.
That is why these two stations are the busiest in Toronto, the Bloor-Yonge with over 350 thousand and St. George’s 250 thousand daily users. These two stations force you to join the other communities of the TTC. I see the Bloor-Yonge station and St. George station as a public spaces. I want to create spaces within these stations to allow the passengers to stop and look around. Have the passengers walk into a completely new setting.
Subway stations have the ability to become an urban public space that relieves the anxiety of public transportation. Allow people to wander and explore the subterranean labyrinth. There are a limitless reasons to encourage the use of public transportation. In subways, you are caught in a dialogue; preforming roles that come and go. We are the actors and the audience.
We wear masks that represent roles in society; our theatrical outfits create situations. We create these situations through trial and error. Sennett says that in an era that lost religious rituals or transcendental beliefs, we can no longer where “masks” that are not readily made. Thus, these masks must be created by the individual.
The development of personality today is the development of the personality as a refugee. Richard Sennett questions, “Is it human to form soft selves in a hard world? As a result of the immense fear of public life which gripped the last century, there results today a weakened sense of human will” (Sennett 323). The past has built a hidden desire for stability in the overt desire for closeness between human beings. The development of personality today is the development of the personality of a refugee.
W.G. Sebald demonstrates how everyday architecture goes beyond by just being a memento. In Austerlitz, we experience the past through architectural settings, humans have a desire in human nature to make common experiences out of the past, either of one’s own or of others. Austerlitz recalls his own personal experiences through pieces of architecture.
These memories and experiences that Sebald mentions are not found in the average person. Today we can see the fall of a prized way of life. We picture the past with a sense of regret, and according to Richard Sennett, “regret is a dangerous sentiment” (Sennett 321). Regret may produce empathy of the past, but regret induces a resignation about the present.
This feeling of regret and lost personality is extremely clear in the Toronto subway stations; they show no history, no culture, a complete lack of human interest. Just like most subway stations in North America, these stations have deteriorated to an extent that almost creates a hostile environment for the commuter. In reality, every station I have experienced in Toronto could be improved, even the newest stations lack a sense of public life.
IS IT POSSIBLE, DESPITE OUR OBVIOUS DISTANCE FROM CLASSICAL CULTURE AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF PUBLIC SPACE, TO RECREATE “ARCHITECTURE AS AN EVENT” AS A FRAMEWORK TO CONFIGURE POTENTIAL URBAN SPACE IN TORONTO?