When James Brown and Kim Storey opened Dundas Square a few years ago there was an almost audible intake of breath from some critics who found it too, well, stark. Then something happened. The surrounding buildings that Brown and Storey premised their scheme on neared completion. The square's interactive elements came online. More than that, on almost any summer day the plaza filled with people using it in predictable and unpredictable ways. Sometime last year the critical mood changed. Dundas Square's robust inner beauty began to be appreciated. Experience it yourself. You can reach the square by subway at the Dundas stop on the Yonge Street Subway line.

What are the designers at Brown and Storey Architects reading?
Differences – Topographies of Contemporary Architecture
Writing Architecture series
By Ignasi de Sola-Morales
Translated by Graham Thompson, Edited by Sarah Whiting


Shift – Inside Nissan’s Historic Revival
By Carloa Ghosn and Philippe Ries
Currency Doubleday

Bernard Frize – Size Matters
Carre d’Art Musee d’art contemporain de Nimes
199-06-1999 - 26-09-1999
Actes Sud

The Unconquerable World
Jonathan Schell
Metropolitan Books

Investigations
Stuart Kauffman
Ozford University Press

Land Mosaics
The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions
Richard T. T. Forman
Harvard University, Cambridge university Press

Landscape Urbanism
A Manual for the Machinic Landscape
AA
Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle

Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Gregory Bateson
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London

Lafayette Park Detroit CASE
Hilberseimer / Mies van der Rohe
Charles Waldheim,
Harvard Design School

Saturday
Ian McEwan

1. For a long time I wondered who had designed the disaster that Dundas Square is. Now I know and I’m trying to get to them to let them know what I and many of my friends think of the mess they made of the sqaure.
   It is ugly, ugly, ugly. Let’s not even talk about how cold and unwelcoming it is. Have they ever seen how some of the great public squares around the world work, and how they invite and draw people in? Their square is repellant and most people hurry by without even glancing at it. There is nothing attractive about it and no reason for people to want to linger there. To accomplish the uses to which it is now put no design was necessary. All that was needed was an open space, and people would have gathered.
   And what is the function of the pillars with which they lined Dundas Steet? All they do is provide a barrier between the people walking or driving by and the square itself. All in all, ugly, ugly,ugly and a waste of money. That they shold have been paid for such a relentlessly ugly design is a disgrace. Stevie Wonder would have done a better job.

   Posted by  on  01/28  at  08:49 PM

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