Canadian megastructure
The Government of Ontario announced recently that Ontario Place on the Toronto waterfront would soon undergo a drastic "makeover". What this means remains to be seen. Ontario Place is one of a handful megastructures that were built in Canada during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1976, the architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote about this new building type of the late-postwar period. These “megastructures,” as he called them, were characterized not by their size but by their structural frameworks that promoted (if only rhetorically) formal and programmatic polyvalence. Banham dubbed late-1960s Montreal “Megacity” because of its seeming abundance of megastructures, but this was to some extent an illusion created by Expo 67.
Instead, apart from Place Bonaventure in Montreal, the two most significant realized Canadian megastructures of the late-1960s were in southern Ontario. The first, which I visited for the first time since my regular summer visits while growing up, is Ontario Place, by the architect Eb Zeidler, part of an only partially realized plan to develop not only the waterfront but also the water itself (think Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo Bay). The second, which Banham does mention, is a superblock hospital at McMaster University in Hamilton (my hometown), also by Zeidler. Ontario Place stands out, however, because it embodies the ludique in both program and spirit, which Banham felt was central to the megastructure ethos. I have no idea why this project is not better known outside Toronto: where else can you still paddle-boat in late-60s techno-utopia?
