Post-war Toronto was creative and dynamic. It was a hotbed of industrial and artistic activity. Toronto had attitude, it was brash and confident. It not only reinvented art and architecture but re-engineered it.
It all came together like one beautiful storm, brewing an intoxicating wind of change, a system that would remake and retool Canadian industry and establish Canada's manufacturing infracture, thereby creating bot a middle class and an artistic class that would redesign the city, realising some of the very best and most uncompromising examples of art and architecture this country has ever seen.
The end of the war was seen as a new beginning. We built the Victory Soya Mills on the Toronto waterfront, a colossal structure of concrete silos with "VICTORY" written in bright red sans-serif across its superstructure to annpounce Canada's triumph in Europe and reiterate Canada's modern aesthetic heritage all in one bold stroke.
In the days after the war, young men and women in Canada, with dreams in their veins pubped up by victory, believed anything was possible. Immigrants disembarking in Halifax and Montreal had left behind the devastation of the Old World and were determined to build a new one, one which would lead to lives and new careers.
And into the midst of this came architect Peter Dickinson, fresh off the boat in Halifax and building up a storm in a manner most Dickinson. John C. Parkin and Macklin L. Hancock, newly graduated from Harvard, were full of piss and vinegar, looking to roll up their sleeves and execute the never-before-imagined.
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From the igloo to concrete silos to prairie grain elevators to Canadian Pacific's Empress liner series to wartime housing - Canada's aesthetic is simple, clean and functional. Modern is our national form and our inherent design language.
Toronto was a city like no other. We were Hogtown, and loving it! We had a style and a forward, get-out-of-my-way attitude. At the same time, we were a city of outstanding cultural depth and vision. Ours was a modern city that carried weight and gravity in art, design and architecture. We believed in our young, we nurtured them and we believed the future was bright.
Toronto was [at] the most, a cultural and industrial revolution, an artistic explosion. It was breathtaking. Toronto. We are the citizens of no mean city.
*taken from the Introduction pages of Mean City: From Architecture to Design: How Toronto Went Boom by John Martins Manteiga
Just coming out of mourning for Jack Layton and I believe this should be a starting off point for all Torontonians who have been inspired to work for this city. I think I am back in the game. This is me pledging my involvement in City Politics after my 2 year hibernation!!! I am totally psyched! I love Toronto. Toronto IS my city and I hope to see you rise again.
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