"World's Tallest" Illustration by Strongandfree.ca
From our old building we could see, through a sliver of highrises, Toronto’s downtown and the CN Tower. Now we look west to the green canopy of the west end and if we peer south from the balcony edge we have a view of the immensity of High Park, where we walk and cycle, when the weather’s warm.
When my girlfriend’s parents see a clip of Toronto on Russian TV there will inevitably be a shot from the harbourfront with the tower prominent. I know my former students, scattered around the world, in Asia, Mexico, Brazil and Europe, will reminisce and the CN Tower, and Toronto’s skyline, will forever be a backdrop to their memories. Why is the tower so compelling? What does it mean to us? How did the CN Tower come to be?
Conceived as both tourist attraction and communications tower, ultimately the size of the tower was the result of a motivation to go higher than the Ostankino tower in Moscow. A claim to be “the biggest and the best” was central to the mission. Today it is both landmark, reminding locals and tourists which way is south, and decorative addition to the skyline – with its thousands of LED lights lit up at night — the world’s tallest free-standing Christmas tree. The construction of the tower (1973-1976) followed the buzz of 1967 (the Montreal Expo, Canada’s world coming out party) and remains a symbol of hope and pride to Torontonians and visitors to the city.
This weekend’s Saturday Star had an article by the architecture critic Christopher Hume, about the excesses that have wracked Dubai and produced the Burj Khalifa tower. Hume tends to write about the positives on the Toronto skyline: new green buildings, LEED certification, and rooftop gardens, among many other discussions. (In a recent blog post I referred to his article on Douglas Coupland’s new waterfront park in Toronto’s downtown).
The Star’s critic writes:
Of course, there’s nothing new about the desire to build higher and higher. The “edifice complex” has been around at least since the ancient Egyptians started building pyramids 4,500 years ago. Since then, things have grown ever taller.
In North America, the heyday of the race to the sky was played out in New York during the 1920s and ’30s. It reached a climax with the rivalry between the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings.
Toronto’s flight into the architectural stratosphere came in the 1970s with the construction of the country’s tallest building, First Canadian Place, and more dramatic still with the world’s tallest free-standing structure, the CN Tower.
Hume astutely compares the Burj tower to another modern relic, the Hummer. They both represent conspicuous consumption and a new world order that worships at the “bigger is better” altar, and stubbornly refuses to economize for the common good. The Burj was constructed in part with a massive crew of immigrant labor, and as we have seen unfold, under a badly mismanaged financial system which worked furiously for a brief moment to convince the world that they were building a modern utopian cosmopolitan and super-rich city.
What will the Burj come to represent for the locals? The names refers to the “caliph” or “successor” (to Muhammad). Will the tower be a destination for rich locals and foreign tourists? Will it be a point of pride on their horizon? Does it represent a changing of power away from the west, or the rise of the “developing world?”
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Post-script: It is worth noting that China is constructing a half-dozen gargantuan towers (one of which is not finished and already taller than the CN Tower), all of which rival the biggest skyscrapers in the world. Today, the CN Tower is the 3rd tallest “man-made structure.” The next biggest Canadian structure on the list is the “Inco Superstack” nickel smelter in Sudbury (29th in the world).
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Christopher Hume says the “proletarian” Burj may be iconic but lacks “poetry” and could have been the perfect Soviet skyscraper. He also argues that we often forget that architecture is “not just an economic phenomenon, but also an art form.” In any case the Burj tower is fascinating and Hume’s article is an engaging devil’s advocate view. http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/747815–hume-tallest-tower-emblematic-of-dubai-s-ugly-excess
Like the Hummer, some boys need to show that they have something bigger and more impressive than other boys in an attempt to prove something… what I don’t know… Good article…
Ironically, the CN Tower was a big mistake. In the early 70′s, every city built a big tower to broadcast TV signals, and Toronto was late to the game. However, between designing and building the tower, satellites started being shot into space, and needlessly tall and expensive towers were no longer needed to broadcast radio & TV signals. Before the CN Tower was even finished, its need and purpose had been destroyed. This is why it remained the tallest tower for so long – no city in the world really had a need to go that high.
Still, it’s iconic.
I’m no expert but I am pretty sure that the functionality of the tower as a carrier of radio/tv and other communications signals was important in the 1970s and IS STILL important now. The point of the blog entry is about the adaptation of the tower to a tourist-friendly facility – thus the “need and purpose” aspect related to communications became almost irrelevant (I guess we do agree! But “destroyed” is off the mark).
FYI – “As at Januay 1, 2003, broadcasting sevices on the CN Tower included 7 television stations, 8 FM stations.”
http://www.broadcasting-history.ca/index3.php?url=http://www.broadcasting-history.ca/engineering/CN_Tower.html