Financial District Gondola
Urban Gondolas provoke awe and that’s a good thing.Cities need more of that, so long as that awe isn’t at the expense of good ideas and sound planning.
Back in the winter of 2008, I was working on a report about Cable Propelled Transit (CPT). I’d had the idea to take images of familiar landscapes from my native Toronto, and photo-manipulate the images so that gondolas appeared as part of the local infrastructure.
The images were crude and aggressive, but intentionally so. The point was not to suggest to the reader that this is what exists in reality, but was instead to engage the reader’s creativity and imagination by posing the questionwhat are the implications of this?
Nearing the end of the project, I was proofing a draft of the report at my local pub in Cabbagetown, the truly wonderful House on Parliament (excellent Prime Rib on Sundays, by the way). One of the bartenders, a terrifically cheerful girl named Kari, asked me what I was working on. I held up the following picture:
Don Valley Gondola Line
Kari’s eyes grew wide like a child at a newly-discovered toy store and she said (with not a hint of sarcasm) “that would be awesome!” It was at that point I knew I was onto something.
In this age of civic ennui, when was the last time someone invoked awe to describe any municipal project, let alone infrastructure? Nowadays, we’re so jaded and bitter about transit, we’re impressed by the mere act of a streetcar arriving 7 minutes late instead of 15.
Maybe a little bit of awe would be good for us.
TD Centre image by Steven Dale, licensed under a Creative Commons cc-by-sa license. Original images by –b– and John Vetterli.
Don Valley image by Steven Dale, licensed under a Creative Commons cc-by-sa license. Original images by PearlyV and macloop.