April 6, 2008
Illustration Sunday: Graphic Arts Building
Recent renovations at the ROM and OCAD have been subject to much discussion, but there’s more to Toronto than contemporary architecture. Though often overlooked, there are a variety of interesting historical buildings to be found around town. This is the second in a series of three posts exploring some of these hidden treasures.
The Graphic Arts Building is located at 73 Richmond Street West. At only five stories, its scale sets it apart from neighbouring high-rises in the business district. Prominent features include Ionic columns and a classical inspired design.
Illustration by Kevin McBride. This drawing and others from the Buildings series are on display at The Cameron House (408 Queen Street West) until April 14th.
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"Though often overlooked, there are a variety of interesting historical buildings to be found around town."
I've had an idea for a website for a while now, relevant to this. I don't know if such a place exists, but the concept is as follows.
A website cataloging buildings, monuments, statues, structures et cetera throughout the city - each gets its own page. On the page, a photo, address, history, interesting relevant stories, what's currently happening with it (what it's used for, essentially). All sorts of things.
While it would certainly only appeal to a niche crowd, I do believe such a crowd (in Toronto, certainly) is large enough to sustain such a website (via ad revenue, possibly -far- later on setting up tours and the like). Hey, could even get a chain of them going, Gothamist LLC-style - different cities around the globe. (Though with a title along the lines of 'DiscoverTO' or 'OurToronto' / 'OurTO,' because themed site names are better.)
As a meta-note, if anybody is seriously interested in doing this, have any opinions/input or anything of the like, feel free to contact me - here. Or, if you'd prefer to do it on your own go right ahead - the idea is public domain and if anybody pulled it off it'd be kickass.
I mean, I for one am definitely interested in learning more of the city, its history, stories, legend, fables through the structure itself - I didn't even know this building (the Graphic Arts Building) existed until a few minutes ago. But there's no real reason I haven't. See what I mean?
--Sorry, that 'here' was supposed to link to my email address, zack.lovatt@gmail.com. Cheers.
I love the idea, Zack. That would be one hell of a big job, though.
Absolutely - the ways I can imagine it working out include a team of volunteers doing this part-time, whenever they have the chance to do some research, take some photos and the like, or a team of employees (part- or full-time) dedicated enough to spend their time on the project.
Another potential idea is the publicly-open Wiki format. Issue with this is vandalism, factuality and the like; I know that with Wikipedia itself the magnitude of the project eliminates most of these however I believe that this will be small enough that many of the pages could and probably would end up erroneous and unnoticedly so.
I would participate in that, because a site that would allow the public to edit (like a wiki but perhaps with a unique custom design) would be awesome.
We have something like that, the incredibly precise www.tobuilt.com . I've spent so many hours going through it, but it could be so much more.
It would be a cool idea. A quick search for free wiki hosting turns up some possible options that would require no up-front costs to start up. I suppose a multi-user blog (eg. Blogger) could work too, but probably not as good a fit for that type of project. Or maybe even a Flickr group.
Nice illo this week Kevin. Best wishes for the show!
It also sounds as if we're getting vaguely into Torontopedia territory?
TOBuilt is way better, but the UrbanDB is also a useful catalogue of buildings.
I was involved in the early planning stages for a site something like this, to have been called The Lost City of Toronto, a couple of years ago. The focus was more historic than architectural, which made us realize we were wandering into rather well-tread (albeit niche) territory.
People would submit/edit the content as described above.
At least I got to visit the Toronto [Starbucks] Reference Library [and Scotiabank Hall] for the first time.
I remember going into a meeting of some kind in the Graphics Arts Building about 20 years ago. Nice to see the illustration here, an I will be investigating the other sites mentioned.
Tuds