Exploring ghosts in the machines

Industrial architecture revealed in new Toronto photo exhibit

Abandonment and decay are not the happiest subjects but they are nonetheless recurring themes in a new exhibit of architectural photography currently showing at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel.
Building Storeys 2010: A Photo Exhibit of Toronto’s Industrial Past is a document of the city’s vast array of factory and facility buildings constructed as far back as a century ago. Though the show’s more than 70 photos contain not a single person, they do hint at lives lived in local industrial spaces now abandoned.
The feelings that the show’s images evoke aren’t all bleak however; the seven Toronto and area photographers whose work comprises Building Storeys 2010 manage to also highlight industrial spaces still in use – some of which could even be described as majestic. The show is a presentation of Heritage Toronto and local photography groups The Shadow Collective and DK Photo Group.
In the third and fourth floor hallways of the Gladstone that are currently doubling as exhibit space for the photography show, visitors will see striking images of formerly used Toronto buildings such as the Hearn Generating Station and the ominously named Wellington Destructor. The Hearn, still situated in the Port Lands, was half a century ago Canada’s largest thermal electric station and its original construction included structural steel, reinforced concrete slab floors and brick infill walls. Closed in 1994 over air pollution concerns, photographers Rob Dyke, Sean Galbraith, Mathew Merrett, Olena Sullivan, and Toni Wallachy capture the Hearn in a complex and ghostly former glory.
Despite its purpose as a municipal incinerator, Building Storeys 2010 points out that the Wellington Destructor, designed by architect G.W.F. Price in 1925, has a “classical grace,” with features such as parapets and arched and flat-headed windows. Currently listed in an inventory of heritage properties, the exhibit presents mostly forlorn images of the Destructor as detritus fills echoing empty spaces.
There’s promise, however, in three local industrial buildings constructed in the first three decades of the 20th century and featured in the show. The 1929 John Street Roundhouse – built by the Canadian Pacific Railway – is now a popular railway museum. A Canadian National Railway locomotive shop in Leaside, built in 1919, has been designated under the Ontario Heritage Act and a redevelopment is in the works. Images of a 1910 Parkdale linseed oil factory by Galbraith, Sullivan, and Wallachy capture graffiti and neglect, but the century-old building may one day re-open as a sustainable designed community centre.
The show’s bleaker images recede when the artists train their lenses on the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant in Toronto’s eastern Beach neighbourhood. The crown jewel of the city’s municipal works buildings, images such as Timothy Neesam’s “Hallway” preserve the ambition and classical order of the Harris, a controversial project built during the 1930’s Depression and opened in 1941. The plant is the largest single surviving example of Art Deco architecture in the city and its uneasy birth provided not only a lasting landmark but a continuing integral component of Toronto’s drinking water system – almost half of the city and York Region’s daily tap water needs (950 million litres) are processed at the Harris facility.
In the west end of the city, the R.L. Clark Water Treatment Plant supplies about a quarter of Toronto’s water demands and the plant’s 1960’s modernist architecture is evoked in Building Storeys 2010 images such as Neesam’s “Kiosk.” Initially completed in 1968 at a cost of $21 million, the Clark was expanded between 2005 and 2007 at a cost of $35 million.
Water treatment facilities at the east end’s Ashbridges Bay are a visual revelation through images by Galbraith, Neesam, and Wallachy. The photographers document industrial interiors of metal and glass that have a functional beauty.
Finding the beauty in the functional is a large part of Building Storeys 2010. The show’s images also hint at a promise of re-birth, and the recently refurbished Gladstone makes it an appropriate venue for the exhibit.
Building Storeys 2010: A Photo Exhibit of Toronto’s Industrial Past continues to Feb. 27 at the Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. W. Daily viewing hours are noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free.

Publication Date: 2010-02-14
Story Location: http://www.tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=9858