Tall Poppy Interview: Terry Murray, Writer and Gargoyle Aficionado

After reading Terry Murray's book Faces on Places we spent the next week looking up at buildings in Toronto, trying to figure out what else have we been missing. A visit to a chiropractor soon followed. Murray, who's a journalist for the Medical Post, became enamored with the "gargoyles" and sculptures that decorate Toronto's buildings and we're grateful that she did. Her book is an eye-opening, head tilting look at these oft-ignored details of the city's architecture. We e-mailed her a few questions and discussed gargoyles now lost and why Ryerson kids get pissed off at those sculptures on the walls of Kerr Hall.

How did the idea for a book on "gargoyles" start?

About 13 years ago, I saw a montage of photos of architectural detail on the cover of the Chicago Tribune magazine. They were all kinds of detail — reliefs, terra cotta, turrets. The individual pieces were striking and the overall effect was impressive. Chicago, which is where I grew up, is known for its architecture, whereas Toronto really isn't. But I took that cover as a challenge and set out with my camera in search of Toronto's architectural detail. That got narrowed down to gargoyles and then broadened to any kind of humanoid sculpture on buildings.

What makes some of Toronto's carvings unique?

Canadian content. I devote a chapter of the book to this. Several buildings not only incorporate Canadian motifs (which was apparently a radical idea at the time, and one proposed by an Irish-born architect), but some are a series of friezes and reliefs that tell Canadian narratives.

Did you have any particular favourites?

Oh yeah. I'm very fond of the figures on the Staples Business Depot building at Yonge and Marlborough (which used to be the Pierce-Arrow Showroom and later, CBC-TV studios), mostly because they're some of the little remaining work of Merle Foster, a popular sculptor from the 1920s through about the 1950s. No one remembers her now, and most of the buildings she worked on have been torn down. I also like the guy near the top of Sterling Tower (on Bay Street, just south of Old City Hall) - you can barely see him from the street, at least without binoculars, but he looks apoplectic and is shouting into an old-fashioned candlestick telephone. There are also the little medieval clerics in an archway in Burwash Hall at U of T. There are about six of them, only about 3.5 metres up, but no one sees them. I think of them as my personal finds.

How do you think we've done in protecting these carvings?

There was a lot of destruction and demolition in the 1960s and 1970s which seems to have slowed considerably, if not stopped completely. For example, the move back then, which very nearly succeeded, to tear down Old City Hall would never get off the ground today.

One of the things that struck me are the controversies, it really goes against the stereotype that Torontonians don't care much about how their city looks, can you comment on that?

I'm not sure the stereotype exists, or at least not to the same degree that it once did. Consider the opposition to the condo tower that was proposed for the McLaughlin Planetarium site next to the ROM, for example, and the keen interest people seem to have in the additions to the ROM or the AGO.

But of the controversial sculptures I mention in the book, which I called "stones of contention," the most controversial were those on Ryerson's Kerr Hall. I think the violent reaction to those sculptures was a product of university students, the 1960s and, let's face it, Ryerson's inferiority complex. Many of the objections to the graduate and the hockey player on the outside southern face of Kerr Hall and some of the emblems of the "household sciences" were that they made the place look like a high school.

I think the violent reaction to the Ryerson sculptures, along with trends in architecture, meant there was virtually no ornament for another 30 years in Toronto. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, there have been tentative steps back to decorating buildings — Michael Snow's fantastic "Audience" on SkyDome, the griffins on the Lillian Smith Library on College Street and the return of the gargoyles to the clock tower of Old City Hall.

Can you talk a bit about modernist architeture and contemporary architecture and the move away from ornament and decoration?

I'm not an architect or architectural historian. I'm a medical journalist, and I'd like to think an observant, self-taught amateur when it comes to architecture and sculpture. There is some truth to the notion of the swinging pendulum. Most of the new buildings — the ROM addition, the AGO addition, the Royal Conservatory and others, all of which interestingly enough are cultural buildings, are all smooth metal and concrete and glass, without a gargoyle, turret or curlicue. But humans have been ornamenting buildings since the ancient Greeks, so I expect we'll see the return of that, maybe in new ways.

Faces on Places is published by House of Anansi Press.