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"Toy Town"
The Octagonal Gallery
Canadian Centre for Architecture
Through May 31 1998
(Courtesy Canadian Centre for Architecture)
| At the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a look at what toys can
tell us about cities. by Gavin Affleck There is nothing, the axiom has it, as serious as play, and few institutions take play (and everything else) as seriously as Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture. For six years the CCA has held an exhibition of architectural toys to mark the holiday season. This year's display, entitled "Toy Town," adds a new dimension to the annual event. Curated by Cammie McAtee of the CCA and designed by Peter Smithson, the distinguished British architect and urban theorist, the exhibition focuses on toys that create imaginary towns, presenting more than two dozen fully assembled toy villages, puzzles, and games from Europe and the United States. It's a fascinating look at how toys communicate basic ideas about urban life. A bucolic German village set up in the middle of the emphatically symmetrical Octagonal Gallery serves as the centerpiece of the exhibit, and argues for a healthy combination of the urban and the rural. The work of a nineteenth-century toy maker in Seiffen, the village creates direct material and functional relationships between the woolly backs of sheep, the carefully tended hedgerows and arbors, and the thatched roofs of cottages and barns. As an integration of animal, vegetable, and mineral, this toy is unique in the exhibit and deserving of its prominent position. And for those who would limit architecture to the making of buildings, the village is the least architectural toy on view. Forming a loop around this central display are a great variety of toy towns, most of which concentrate attention on the impact of individual buildings on townscapes. We travel from Urbania, a Parisian vision of ordered civic spaces, circa 1935, to Plasticville, U.S.A., a gas station fantasyland of 1952. Along the way, there are stops in a Russian monastery, a Belgian garden city, an interactive computer-generated town, and Fairy City, a nineteenth-century industrial town that is home to the Giants of Lilliputania. Although none of the toys on display were designed by architects or urbanists, they present a compelling architectural history: the great clarity with which "Toy Town" chronicles the evolution of town planning from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century is the most intriguing aspect of the show. Animals, vegetation, and domesticity progressively disappear from the townscape, and as Smithson points out in the accompanying catalogue, American "object-space" gradually replaces European conceptions of spatially mediated urban form. This story is not new in itself: What is new is its telling through toys. Like cartoons, toys simplify, abbreviate, and reinterpret in bright colors and simple shapes the essence of complex forms. The success of "Toy Town" is closely related to the power of the cartoon in the 1990s: from Roger Rabbit to the Simpsons, popular culture has been reshaped through a potent and ubiquitous mix of childlike delivery and adult content. The great attraction of both toys and cartoons is their ability to sustain an idealism inaccessible to other media. The scale of intervention particular to town planning further reinforces this idealism: by necessity, planning tends toward utopian visions. As the common thread between widely divergent conceptions of the city, the idealism that suffuses "Toy Town" creates some provocative images. We discover, for instance, that some of the places that architects love to hate are in fact quite beautiful in their ideal form. Like a three-dimensional David Hockney painting, Plasticville's roadside motel, swimming pool, snack bar, and gas station exude the character and object integrity so completely lacking in contemporary suburbia. Apparently, plasticity had noble beginnings as a democratic paradigm of flexibility, and only degenerated into its ersatz condition through misinterpretation and unfulfilled promises. If the ability of toys to sustain ideals in a cynical world is a central theme of this exhibition, so too is another somewhat neglected pursuit, humanism. In his preface to the catalog, CCA chief curator Nicholas Olsberg Describes Smithson's humanist approach to architecture: "Smithson remains faithful to a belief that gentle and orderly design strategies, respectful of people's habits of life and of the specific character of the place itself, can make any community... lighter, freer, and more responsive to its users." Given such a bias, "Toy Town" is a perfect opportunity for Smithson to play the cuddly old British uncle part to the hilt. A lecture he gave to accompany the opening was devoted almost entirely to an extremely comfortable domestic environment he had designed for a cat (located, like the centerpiece of the exhibition, in the German countryside). While it was easy to suppose that Smithson is in his dotage, his positing of a relationship between a comfortable old age and children's toys has a much greater resonance if we recall the work of his youth. More than 30 years ago, as a member of Team X, the influential architecture group, he was instrumental in reintroducing humanism (and playfulness) to the deadly serious Modernist establishment of the time. "Toy Town" is refreshingly undogmatic, taking pleasure in a plurality of approaches to the city and in an abiding faith in the creation of a better future through our children. Each of the toys on display is at once a beautiful plaything and a repository for very adult ideas about what the city should be. Truly successful toys, like successful towns, must create interest for both children and adults, blurring the distinction between ages. Barney the Dinosaur reaches new heights of banality precisely because he communicates by strictly childish means, precluding any adult appeal. Happily, as "Toy Town" shows us, he is not the only option. Gavin Affleck is a partner in the Montreal-based firm Affleck + de la Riva Architectes. |
Keywords:
Montreal, Canadian Centre for Architecture, toys
