I've got a big bunch of ideas rolling around in my head today. Perhaps some part of my cerebral cortex has registered that Richard Florida has been in town over the weekend, seeding the air with interesting talk about geography and commerce. I'll roll out the ideas one by one so as to avoid those epic blog posts that cause readers' eyes to glaze over. Just a short note today about landmarks.
Landmarks can serve in an iconic role. Marketing a city can revolve around landmarks of one kind or another. In Toronto, the city where I grew up (kinda), the buzz over the last couple of years has come from dazzling architectural creations like the Libeskind renovation of the ROM (which doesn't do it for me) and the Gehry transformation of the AGO (which definitely does): two new city landmarks. But another time-worn strategy is to go tall. When I ask you to think of famous city landmarks, you're likely to jerk your gaze upwards. The Seattle needle, the Washington monument, the Eiffel Tower, the CN Tower. Not all of these landmarks are beautiful. In fact, with the possible exception of the Washington monument (and I can't say why I like that one more than the others), none of them caress my eye. Sometimes, in exceptional circumstances, a landmark can be a tall hole in space. When I visit Manhattan, I still find my eyes drawn to two extra towers of gaping sky. Landmarks can identify a space in a city and make a wide range of different statements ranging from "I am here" to "This is what we were." That hole in space in Manhattan is, if it's anything, a kind of temporal marker separating us from a time that at least seemed simpler, even if we now understand we may have been deluded. That hole has dropped the veil from our eyes, perhaps.
In a new video, I talk about the landmark that meant the most to me growing up. This one, living in a landscape that I knew well as a child, is woven through some of my own autobiography. It keeps me in place on the drive in to the city, so it acts as a navigational landmark, but it's much more than that. I can't look at it without finding that some ancient memory has been triggered.
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