Captain's blog: 2004/08

Toronto Architecture course ends

Posted Monday, August 16, 2004 at 8/16/2004 01:18:42 PM

Exam tonight, for the Toronto Architecture course. It was a truly rare and enjoyable course — taught completely by actually walking the streets and going inside the architecture of Toronto. Did I mention I love field trips? And we get a credit for this. I wish all my courses could be this fun.

I took a ton of photos. The one featured here was of our class in the boardroom on the topmost, 54th floor of the sleek black modern TD Tower of the Toronto Dominion Centre. Our tall prof stands on the right pondering something while we make ourselves comfortable spreading across the room. The architect was Mies Van Der Rohe, and the TD Centre complex is considered a culmination of his life’s work. We were also on the 54th floor because it was a floor entirely designed by him, as the bulk of the tower was rented office space, up to the tenants to renovate as they saw fit. The 54th floor was the exception, being occupied by the owners, the Toronto Dominion Bank. Everything here, from the garbage bins, to the giant oak conference table carved from a single tree, the walls, the clocks and even the washrooms were designed by him. Normally closed to the public (except for the Doors Open Toronto event that John our corporate guide mentioned), the one thing you should not miss if you ever come up here is the spectacular view through the giant curtain windows. You can see Toronto and the harbor, everything in miniature, quite similar to the view from the CN Tower. This photo unfortunately only shows the boardroom, click to view.

The majority of the photos, other than zooming in on architectural features covered in class, were horizontally panned sequences. So that I could potentially re-create what it was like to be at that spot, by making interactive panoramas using any free Java-applet viewers such as Duckware’s PMVR which comes with a floor plan feature.

At the moment the few photos I managed upload are viewable on a photo gallery, for myself and any classmates who were there when I announced it at the last class:

http://members.lycos.co.uk/ejlennox/

Tripod Lycos (UK) had less storage space than I had expected, so I couldnt upload all the photos I wanted, and had to be more selective. Next time, for similarly large batches I should go with a service that actually specializes in photos such as Fotki or Fotopic, etc.