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Dominion Modern is Canada’s foremost archive of 20th Century Canadian architecture and design.
Our mission is to collect, catalogue, preserve, and promote public awareness and understanding of our architectural and design heritage.
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Since 2003, Dominion Modern has established itself as a leading authority on this essential, yet often overlooked, period in our nation’s cultural development.
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By Matthew Liebenberg, National Post
At a time when much of the city’s modern architecture is being lost to the wrecking ball, its fans think they have a solution. All it will take to allow the Dominion Modern Museum to find a permanent home is $2-million.
“I’m full of ideas, I’m full of energy, I just need money,” said John Martins-Manteiga, the museum’s founder and director. “We’ll raise the money to purchase the building and have a fund that will keep the museum functioning. I don’t want to get the building and then lose the museum. I want to keep it forever.”
Mr. Martins-Manteiga thinks he has found a suitable building to provide a permanent home for the Dominion Modern, which he established in 2003 as an archive of modern architecture and design. He hopes to establish a blue-ribbon panel of Torontonians to give prominence to fund-raising efforts.
Toronto city councillor Adam Vaughan, an ally of the museum whose father Colin worked as an architect in Toronto during the fifties and sixties, said he is confident funding can be raised pretty quickly.
“It’s a legacy project that the architectural, engineering and development partners in the private sector have a stake in protecting,” he said. “They have a lot to be proud of in terms of what was accomplished and the legacy left to the city. They have an even greater stake in making sure the dialogue is sustained so that buildings contribute to our urban fabric rather than just be places to live and work.”
Catherine Nasmith, a Toronto architect and president of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, said the postwar building boom reflected one of the most optimistic periods in Canadian history, but that architectural legacy is now under attack.
“It’s a huge issue,” she said. “We’re rapidly losing the best works of a whole generation.”
Mr. Vaughan says the city’s modern design tells the story of an era in which Toronto became a new city. “There was something interesting about what happened in Toronto,” he said. “It had to do with the convergence of immigration and of a postwar building environment that has a lot of unique components. To not understand that history explains why you end up with buildings like the ROM that are already falling apart after only opened for six months.”
Mr. Martins-Manteiga is an indefatigable, if quixotic, crusader for Toronto’s threatened architectural gems of the modern period, an era that stretches from perhaps the 1930s to 1970. He’s had more failures than successes, as developers knocked down the old Inglis plant for townhouses, Loblaws bought Maple Leaf Garden to gut it for a food store, and wreckers demolished the Bata Shoe Headquarters, the Inn on the Park and the old Riverdale hospital. The striking half-round Riverdale Hospital building appears to be the next one to go.
Although Ms. Nasmith appreciates the work already done by the Dominion Modern to create a record of modern architecture, she does not want a museum collection to be the only evidence of an era.
“These buildings should be looked after and enjoyed,” she said.
Mr. Martins-Manteiga said the aim is not to preach to the converted, hoping to get ‘‘people who would not ordinarily go into a gallery or museum to come in, to walk around.” He is also proposing an architect lounge at the museum, where architects and designers can ‘‘exchange ideas.”
“Architects used to argue and critique each other. That doesn’t happen any more, it’s a very tight fraternity.”
While happy to talk about his plans for the museum, Mr. Martins-Manteiga is reluctant to say too much about the building he has found. He still remembers what happened when they looked at the former TD Bank building at Queen Street West and Ossington Avenue.
“We actually named the location to stir interest in people,” he said. “There was a buzz, but that buzz also created the fact that it was taken out of our hands and someone else bought it.”
With the museum’s expanding collection of artifacts and material languishing in storage, Mr. Martins-Manteiga speaks with a sense of urgency. He is currently completing two books, one about architect Peter Dickinson and the other on the Montreal Métro.
“After they’re launched I really have to think about the future of Dominion Modern,” he said. “We either do it or we scrap it.”
Photo of John Martins-Manteiga in front of the now-demolished Inn on the Park in 2005 by Brent Foster, National Post
Link: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2008/04/23/give-us-2m-or-this-masterpiece-of-modern-architecture-gets-demolished.aspx#ixzz1Q4cbFq1z
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