Originally Published: 2010-02-14

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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.

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