Monument To Construction Workers | Part 2
Transcript
The monument arose in several different ways. There was an idea first of all for the park. And I began to think about parks. And as you can probably hear from my voice I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in London, England. And London is a city of splendid parks. And what I wanted for Toronto was a splendid park and a park that contained all the things that feed people in their spirit. Canada has the great outdoors, we don’t need a lake in the city, we don’t need a wilderness in the city. But we still need something to lift our spirits during a work day. And one of the things that struck me about growing up in Britain was the role that ruins played in my life. There are no ruins in Toronto. We clean up things, we tidy up things, and by cleaning up and tidying up you take away those little spaces for dreaming, in the way that a child stares at a stain on a bedroom wall at the cottage and fantasizes into that stain.
So I wanted a ruin and we began to think how we could have a ruin. And in the park as you’ll notice there’s a curious condition. There’s one old Dickensian kind of 19th century wall sticking out like a sore thumb. We used the wall, the Monument to Construction Workers, as a screen, as a device that would join the old with the new, that would frame the old and the new, that would frame the city and the sky, that would provide movement and would act as a kind of connective tissue between the separate parts of the city. So the Monument to Construction Workers began as a piece of connective tissue that would describe the ebb and the flow of the built world.
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