ThePlagueYears: A brutal block

Little of note to report. Caitlin and Bob both seem alright still. So far. Bob feels he's pretty much over it. Let's hope he's right. Caitlin doesn't seem to have any very definite symptoms, although she keeps thinking she does, and then the feeling goes away or nothing develops any further. Louis, she thought, seemed a little tired today. But later, she said, he was his usual self. So who knows? We had a Portal call with them this morning.

I did a power walk in blustery, snowy conditions afterwards: along one side of the river and back along the other. It was definitely the coldest it's been in a few days, the wind chill made it seem even colder. And the temperature dropped during the day.

By the time I went out for my afternoon walk, it was windier and, although the sun was shining a bit when I first went out, it was even colder. It eventually started snowing again. The bitterly cold wind practically blew me over a couple of times.

I didn't go far. I was attracted first by the madly flapping flag in the paved area between the federal building at Queens Ave. and Talbot St. and the Service Ontario building next door (originally a Bell building, now owned by Schmuel Farhi.) Don't know why it appealed. But I took some shots.

I never really left that block, the block bounded by Talbot on the east, Queens Ave. on the north, Dundas on the south and Ridout on the west. I started thinking of it as the brutalist block. It's the site of some of the most egregious of 1970s-and-1980s buildings in the city.

There are the aforementioned office tower housing federal civil servants, the Service Ontario building and, at the west end of the block, the fortress-like provincial courthouse. They're all packed in cheek-by-jowl. And then across Dundas St., it's the Budweiser Gardens arena, which while not brutalist exactly certainly fits with my "banality of modern architecture" theme.

Brutalism as a name for a style of architecture originally came into use in the 1950s in Britain. The style is marked by minimalist design, monumental scale and and an emphasis on unadorned building materials, often poured concrete. It could be argued, though, that the style had its antecedents in the monumental architecture of fascist Europe before the war.

There is a coldness and banality to brutalist buildings. They loom and look out blankly on the street. The sidewalks bounding the block are a pedestrian dead zone. There are entrances to the buildings but they're recessed so the exterior seems unbroken and intimidating.

So why spend so much time photographing them?

Partly, it's a good photographic challenge to try and make a half-way interesting image from such a boring subject. But I have to admit that despite their banality, there is something paradoxically appealing about brutalist buildings too - at least to me. It's something about the rectilinearity, the almost geometric quality, and the monumentalism.

So here are a few of the many images I made today.