The 2008 Pug Awards: The people have chosen (the wrong buildings)
Poor Lisa Rochon. Last Saturday, the Globe and Mail’s architecture critic wrote about the Pug Awards—Toronto’s people’s choice awards for architecture—singling out two buildings as “heartbreakingly banal”: the Hazelton Hotel in Yorkville and the Argyle Authentic Lofts in the Ossington-Dundas area. This year, more than 50,000 people cast votes on-line, and apparently they did so just to make her eat her words: the Hazelton and the Argyle emerged as the night’s big winners. The buildings’ profiles are all still on-line (links after the jump), so you can see for yourself that Torontonians have expressed a firm preference for staid, stiff-necked, unembellished, boring conservatism.
The Argyle is pure heritage preservation: it’s the only nominee that looks like it wasn’t built just yesterday—it looks like it was built in 1919. Which is exactly when it was built. But that’s the way we like our buildings in this town: 80 years old. As for the Hazelton, it beat out the ROM’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, to the great dismay of the urban intelligentsia in attendance (all of whom seem to share a preference for distinctive, definitely not conservative eyewear). One prominent Toronto architect was aghast. “I can’t believe it,” he told me, dismissing the Hazelton as “Yorkville infill.”
My theory is that architects love the ROM Crystal not for the end result, but for the purity of the process: they all wish they could find a benefactor who’d let them go totally ape-shit with their design, then actually build the ape-shit structure. Yes, the Crystal was the only truly remarkable Pug nominee this year. But the Crystal is also the newest member of an unfortunate brotherhood of Toronto architecture that includes the Robarts Library: buildings that can double in the movies and in television as the headquarters of an evil empire. The people have spoken. Lisa Rochon and friends, like good little pugs, must now chew their Milk Bones and swallow hard.
• The Pug Awards• Putting buildings in the paws of the people [Globe and Mail] • And the Pug Award goes to [National Post]
I think the people got it right. I guess that’s why I dropped out of architecture school.
I voted for the Argyle Lofts, the Hazelton Hotel AND the ROM Crystal. Each are truly distinctive, and definitely not boring unlike all the characterless, glass condo towers.
In twenty years time, we will likely be horrified at the buildings we are building now, while buildings like the Argyle will endure. If you are buying a condo, don’t invest your money in a glass box.
Lisa is a living stereotype of the worst architect or architectural critic. She follows in the same vein as Le Corbusier and radical, unflinching modernists. A very Marxist approach to architecture that exalts the idea of “the people” but hates actual people. Like the CBC types that vote NDP but hate actual popular figures like Don Cherry.
Architecture, like music composition, has gone past the ridiculous in the theoretical and intellectual community. While no one is irreparably harmed by listening to a discordant “symphony”, useless buildings like Toronto City Hall, Robarts, Philip Johnson’s Glasss House harm many people as they exalt theory over utility.
This reverence for theory is understandable – people interested in architecture are creative and have some brains. They want to exercise their talents, but a field that’s thousands of years old where some of the best examples date from Ancient Greece gives little range for true creativity. It’s also so much harder to make your mark. So just like modern art, they’ve turned inward and focused on theoretical onanism rather than actually serving needs.
The Puglys are wonderfully democratic and a repudiation to numerous academic critics and other pundits of architecture. Lisa Rochon is out of touch with 21st century desires. Polygons of glass, metal and concrete are stuck at the end of the last century.
The craftsmanship and artistry of the masonry used in the Argyle Lofts, Broadview Lofts and Hazelton Hotel are one of the reasons I voted for them. They have a human sensitivity to their materials and mass and are anything but unembellished.
The mathematical precision of the ROM Crystal is better suited for an executive desk toy and the interior is indescribeably ugly. Chris Humes’ frequent declarations that the Crystal was never meant to be built of glass are delusional.
As a ROM member I went to all the previews and saw the all models. It would have been so much better if it was built as a transparent structure, as it was designed. Now it’s a perfect representation of a crystal of galena (lead). It’s a classic example of a marketing ‘bait and switch’ tactic. Or, better yet, a movie producer promising his investors he’ll cast Brad Pitt, but actually can only afford a day time soap star.
Bravo for the Puglys! They are a triumph of beautiful esthetics over abstract theory.