I’m hoping that you understand that the title of this entry references tacky vacation t-shirts like “My brother went to Cabo and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. I’m sorry, I should never underestimate the intelligence of the reader, after all, you already have the good sense to be reading this blog in the first place. Kudos to your good taste. I thought that in honour of the Copenhagen climate change summit this would be an appropriate post.
Let me start off by saying that I subscribe to a ridiculous number of e-newsletters; it keeps me in the know of what is going on in this fair city and what kind of free stuff I can get my hands on. A friend of mine enters every contest that Eye Weekly and Now has to offer every Wednesday. Wins have included an Ashley Tisdale CD and Jamie Foxx concert tickets. It goes to say that you can’t win if you don’t enter –sometimes a correlation does equal causation. In any case, quite a while back I got an email from the Cadillac Fairview Corporation asking me to fill out a survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card. For those that don’t know, the Cadillac Fairview Corporation is a commercial real estate company and they own malls like the Shops at Don Mills, the Eaton Centre and Yorkdale. I’m all for free money and incentives sure work on me to get me to do a silly survey.
The survey was about my perceptions of how “green” the Cadillac Fairview malls are. In the unique response box, i.e. the one at the very end that says “additional comments” I lashed out about how the concept of “green” is quite the elaborate sham and marketing ploy in attempts of corporate social responsibility that tricks an uneducated consumer into believing that somehow this shopping mall is benefiting the environment and that the focus should be more on sustainability ensuring lasting (positive) effects for generations to come. I wonder why I didn’t win the $100 gift card.
On a completely separate occasion a friend of mine and I were talking and I inquired how his mother was doing. He replied that she recently bought a new washer and dryer after the one in their family home had crapped out after 20 some years. The salesperson told her the lifespan of her new washer and dryer should be about 10 years. That’s about the same thing that happened when my family bought our new washer and dryer last year after ours crapped out following 25 years of service.
Whatever happened to quality? Everything we have now is so disposable and nothing lasts longer than a meager decade, year, month, or week. This entry was inspired by an article I read in the September 2009 issue of The Walrus about Paul Merrick, who is an architect in Vancouver. He says that:
Sustainability means all those things: grey water, green rooms, passive ventilation, low-flow showers and toilets, and recycling waste, but there are many dimensions of this thing we call ‘green’. He recalls a recent visit to Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, Austria where he had a eureka moment about sustainability, understanding for the first time that it means building things that last. ‘It’s a little row house downtown with party walls and timber floors and walls built from rubble and stone, and we realized –holy cow –this house was already 600 years old when Mozart lived here. So that’s pretty sustainable, as in, it has been sustained.’
I’m no architect, that’s for sure, but I swear I had the exact same reaction that Merrick did when I visited that house in Salzburg this summer. That’s how I always feel when I’m in historical places whether it’s the Mozart Geburthaus in Salzburg, the ruins of ancient Delphi in Greece, or the Medici chapels in Florence. I am always marveled and taken aback by the multitudes of people before me that have walked through these iconic places. How do these places survive all this time? We of this new millennium think that we are so sophisticated but we can’t build much that seems to last.
Back to the washers and dryers though–how is that things built in the archaic 80s can outlast things built in this shiny, technologically-advanced, eco-friendly time of today? Sure, I can get that new appliances use less power, conserve more water, but if you have to keep buying them that just means more and more need to be manufactured and shipped around the world, more and more recycled and taken apart and that consumes a considerable amount of energy I would think. It’s just like the episode “Into the Crevasse” of “30 Rock” this season (so far the season’s best in my opinion) where the GE microwave division needs to come up with an idea as revolutionary as the light bulb to inspire more people to buy microwaves. One character posits;:, “what if microwaves broke down and people would have to buy them more often?” And naturally “30 Rock” satirizes, in a way no short of brilliance, how our corporations think – if you aren’t watching this show, you really should be.
It saddens me when old Victorian houses are bulldozed in Toronto to make way for condominiums. They pop up in every tiny plot of land imaginable these days. And with the hurried way they are built, it doesn’t take an architectural genius to know that they aren’t built to last. When we don’t preserve our historic buildings we aren’t leaving any real sense of what Toronto was for future generations to come. It’s clear we don’t have an abundance of ancient ruins, if any, but soon all we’re going to have to show for ourselves are shoddily built condominiums.
It isn’t all bad news, I’m not a naysayer of everything (I think), Toronto is leading the way for rooftop gardens to help battle CO2 output, so perhaps we’ll get there with baby steps, but I just wish things would last instead of having to continually reinvent the wheel, is that really too much to ask for something longer than a ten year warranty?
Part of the reason why some ancient structures are capable of lasting so long is primarily due to location and their material of construction. Many buildings of old have mostly stone masonry and are not of wooden construction. Wood rots and weathers faster than most building stone. Most stone materials like granite, sandstone, marble etc have really, really low solubility constants meaning the don't easily wash away in the rain.
ReplyDeleteModern structures are interesting in that they have building codes that requires them to withstand geologic activity, which stone though strong cannot withstand. Also the sheer height that some buildings reach in present day can only be built with materials that are light weight and strong. Modern buildings are built with reinforced concrete or just metal. Though very strong most building metals, like steel, redily oxidize into brittle ionic compounds and unfortunately break away. That is the unfortunate plight of many modern buildings which show their rusty colour in a few decades.
Like you already mentioned we don't have any overabundance of ancient structures to marvel in Canada but wait another 500 years and your descendants might be awestruck by what still stands from our time. Most of the city will look completely different from what it does today but with a few things that remain from our time that tourists will keep alive. We'll see how much funding UNESCO has.
Remember the ruins of ancient Delphi are ruins, not complete functional cities. Most ancient cities are all gone and only a select few remanants remain. So I think we're on the right track and we're doing fine structurally.
//signed//
KTY Chan