PRECIS
The newest, perhaps most au courant 'proposed' park this side of the millennium ... Or so says the publicity machine surrounding this competition (a self-conscious redux of the 1980s Parc de la Villette scenario) ...
The Design Competition (1999) - The Downsview site is "down" as of October 2002 ... Apparently the project was canceled ...
TREE CITYThe competition was won by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (renowned collaborators on the seminal book S, M, L, XL) with Oleson Worland Architects (Toronto) and Inside/Outside a.k.a. Petra Blaise (Amsterdam). Their project, known as Tree City, is fully consistent with the latest fashion in architectural theory -- i.e., systems theory -- as were most of the other premiated projects.
See "Why We Are Not Rem Koolhaas" (Folio IV), Serious Real - The Anti-Journal 1:1
The proposed park's physical site is a formerly ex-urban (now sub-urban) piece of Toronto, a former air force base. This visionary park exists, appropriately, mostly in the imaginations of the designers and the agency empowered to transform this end-of-the-Cold-War, open-space dividend.
The November 2000 panel discussion at MoMA problematizing Downsview and urban parks in general is covered in an article, "Discussing Downsview: Shifting Ground", in the AIA-NY journal Oculus (February 2001). Editor Jayne Merkel reports that the discussion developed around the conflicting notions of dynamic versus static systems, and programmed versus autonomous or spontaneous generation of forms and functions. The premiated projects seem to share a penchant for "cybernetic" terminologies and gestures while remaining significantly vague and, as a result, en vogue. Merkel notes a flair for "whirly, swirly, intertwining circuits" as if the site were a privileged field stationed at an eco-significant hot spot versus an abandoned air force base amidst Toronto sprawl.
THUS SPAKE LEVINAS
"We will not ask whether another transcendence is announced in this end of idolatry, whether, that is, in this secularization, no social site is found. Contemplation passes from its hieratic sense to its obvious sense, which is that of knowledge and intuition; we pass from admiration to philosophy, from idolatry to astronomy, to rationality and to atheism. In this astronomic fixity, the immanent epic and the reign or the kingdom of being is unfolded. A repose or positivity, a displaying within knowledge upon the flat surface of a theme, indifferent to any height and present to the foreground of the display. Being as presence recommencing, being as being as the act of rest, in the form of identification [...] The transcendence of idolatry shows through in the knowledge to which it brings the serenity of theory. This idolatrous transcendence in a world at rest is a state of affairs that is not itself based on the empirical. In the epic of being, this past is the positivity in which all rationality takes on meaning and foundations." [italics added]
Emmanuel Levinas, "Transcendence, Idolatry, Secularization", God, Death, & Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
THUS SPAKE ROBERT SOMOL
"[T]he OMA proposal for Downsview ultimately engages in the branding of nature [...] Tree City offers the fastest and easiest response. Almost entirely disposable, the entry promotes not merely an economy of means, but the total evaporation of means toward all effect. No process, no index, no work, but simply a cool and pervasive image. A graphic reduction moving from the abstraction of a single tree to the planting succession diagrams of ecology, the OMA team's proposal is intensive in the same way as the modern stone age landscape of the Flintstones: in a world reduced to a single material, everything must issue solely from its various traits and phases."
Robert Somol, "All Systems Go!: The Terminal Nature of Contemporary Urbanism", Downsview Park Toronto (New York: Prestel, 2002), p. 131
PROVISIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Julia Czerniak (editor), Downsview Park Toronto (New York: Prestel, 2002)
"Downsview Park Toronto", Lotus International 109 (Spring, 2001)
Bay Brown, "Designing Downsview Park", Van Alen Report 8 (New York: Van Alen Institute, 2000) - Downsview Exhibition
Jayne Merkel, "Discussing Downsview: Shifting Ground", Oculus (February 2001), pp. 11-12
Charles Waldheim, "Park = City?", Landscape Architecture Magazine (March 2001), pp. 80-85, 98-99
Alan Berger, "Learning from Downsview", Landscape Architecture Magazine (March 2001), pp. 132-131
POSTSCRIPTS
The Juncus site, link below, has a full slate of electronic artifacts pertinent to understanding the competition proposals: i.e., polemics, critiques, panels and models. Cliquez ici ... PLEASE NOTE: Juncus has 'disappeared' from the WWW as of 2005 ...
The first comprehensive print publication of the five proposals appeared in Lotus 109 (Spring 2001), an issue entitled "The New Allegorical World / On Theme Parks" ...
Regarding Capitalism's Golgotha (Fresh Kills, 2001), cliquez ici / For the second coming of Parc Downsview Park (if not the Eternal Return of the Same), see Orange County Great Park ... Exhibitions / Events (Yellow Pages) ...
