David Kopulos

Subterranea: myths underfoot in Dallas, Texas

Few would debate that the city of Dallas, Texas stands as a monument to America's car culture. Made famous as the setting for the eponymous TV series, the city began as a compact boom-town before cheap oil awoke Dallasites to the wide open spaces now part of the conurbation known as the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

These days Dallas' downtown core all-but empties before dinner, leaving only the homeless to wander past shuttered office towers and vacant parking lots. The suburbs represent the city's real cultural and economic engine, orbiting the downtown core like planets around a dead star. The suburbs themselves glow with the saturated colours of American optimism.

Dallas is noteworthy not for this expansive horizontality - now common to most North American cities - but rather for its incomplete verticality. Resulting from the flood-prone terrain, up-and-out land use policies, and a deficit of investment in civic infrastructure, Dallas lacks all but the most hesitant and grudgingly necessary underground development. In essence, the city lacks a basement. Houses are built without cellars and the soil underneath the city is bereft of metro stations, underground parking lots, and shopping arcades. Compared with cities where underground construction is often halted for years at a time after archaeological treasures are discovered, Dallas' lack of literal roots underlines a lack of figurative rootedness.

One of the few noteworthy features below the streets of Dallas are the public fallout shelters which were installed at the outset of Cold War. Long decommissioned, some buildings still display signs for these refuges, listing their potential capacity for lucky survivors. Other than these forgotten bunkers, the city's vertical dimension expands solely from the streets up. The underground exists only as a place of fantasy and myth. If digging serves to reveal the past, Dallas' subterranea confirms that in spite of being immortalized on TV, the city's history is yet to be written.

Themesters: inauthentic architecture in Renaissance Italy and today

A short walk down Via de' Cerchi, past the replica of Michelangelo's David and the vendors selling miniature reproductions of the statue, the narrow medieval lane in the historic centre of Florence opens into a small piazza. Forming one side of the square is La Casa di Dante: Dante Alighieri's house. On this spot and in the surrounding alleys, Dante sought inspiration for his Divine Comedy and debated Florentine politics with other citizens of the emerging city-state. Even today with tourists crowding the streets, the neighbourhood exudes an intimate aura of authentic history.

Though few guidebooks mention it and city officials are loath to admit it, Dante Alighieri never lived at La Casa di Dante. Looking for all the world like a weathered medieval palazzo, "Dante's House" was largely constructed less than a century ago, after the city decided a proper monument and mecca for il Sommo Poeta was needed.

For many, the story of themed architecture begins in an orange grove in the early 1950s, when Walt Disney began construction of his first Magic Kingdom. The new pleasure park was designed, decorated, and landscaped to resemble a variety of nostalgic and exotic locales. Behind the detailed facades, industrial buildings housed shops, restaurants, and rides. Astute visitors to Disney's Haunted Mansion, for instance, may realize that the ride itself takes place in an unadorned steel structure hidden behind the brooding antebellum manor. Robert Venturi, pioneer of the postmodern movement in architecture, coined the term decorated sheds to describe this emerging type of architecture: anonymous warehouses sporting false fronts and immersively-decorated interiors.

By creating unmistakably simulated environments, Disneyland is only the most transparent manifestation of the widespread trend toward themed architecture. All visitors to Disneyland (or at least those above a certain age) realize that the crumbling Mayan temples and sun-baked mesas are concrete and steel evocations of locations elsewhere. Beyond theme parks, we encounter themed architecture in malls built to emulate old-world villages, in tony neighbourhoods where Spanish-style monster homes sit beside Tudor mansions, and in the dark wood and polished brass of the ubiquitous Irish pub. The division between real and fake architecture is more complex and its lineage more extensive than the fantasy worlds at Disneyland suggest. As Dante's House demonstrates, architecture designed to masquerade as something else is not solely a product of the postmodern era that made it intellectually acceptable.

If themed architecture is fast becoming ubiquitous, where does the dividing line lie between real and fake? If it depends on a structure's stylistic inspiration, then all appropriated and resurrected architectural styles, from Neoclassicism to Gothic Revival, must be considered as 'themed' since they evoke a location or emotion beyond the immediate context and function of the building.

If the definition relies on the relation of the construction materials to their function, only structures built in strict adherence to the schools of architecture which advocate truth of materials would be exempt. The dictum 'form follows function' would set apart pure modernist architecture as the only contemporary style resistant to theming. Even the architects of early skyscrapers, who hid steel weight-bearing frames behind shrouds of masonry, sought to disguise a building's true character.

The same practice of facadism could be found even in Renaissance Italy. A few minutes' walk to the north-west of Dante's house in Florence leads to the San Lorenzo neighbourhood and its church, one of the city's largest. What immediately sets the church of San Lorenzo apart from its counterparts throughout Florence is its unfinished exterior. Built in the midst of the Italian Renaissance and designed by visionary architect Filippo Brunelleschi, the exterior was left as a rough stone blank. Though decades later, none other than Michelangelo proposed a neoclassical design for the facade, the church remains without one to this day. As they glance at the unclad church of San Lorenzo, past and present citizens of Florence must innately understand Venturi's concept of the decorated shed. The contrast between the rational clarity of Brunelleschi's interior and the Baroque theatricality of Michelangelo's proposed exterior facade mirrors the opposition between the refined clarity of modernist architecture and the neo-Baroque simulacra of postmodernism.

Beyond the decisions of the architect, a buildings' context must also be considered when developing a definition for themed architecture. A particular structure may be considered authentic in one location and ersatz in another. Buildings constructed in the vernacular - using local materials and traditional techniques to address local needs - are not considered to be themed, but in instant cities such as Dubai, the almost total lack of architectural precedent means total freedom to establish a context that future architects must obey or reject. In these places, themed architecture is the vernacular and neighbourhoods of 'traditional' stone and mud buildings become themed enclaves.

Perhaps our surroundings have become saturated with themed architecture so as to make the distinction meaningless. Searching for a dividing line between themed and unthemed today may be irrelevant. In many ways, the roles of themed and unthemed architecture have been reversed: in a sentiment reportedly echoed by Walt Disney himself, French philosopher Jean Baudillard famously suggested that Disneyland is real while the surrounding megacity of Los Angeles is the "hyperreal" simulation. Baudillard points to a deeper insight than even he intended: unlike the freeways, motels, and power shopping centres beyond the park's gates, the cinematic environments of Disneyland illustrate commonly-felt truths: that history constitutes equal parts quaint fantasyland and exotic adventureland, and the future still holds the promise of a better life in a shining tomorrowland. That Disneyland makes these societal truths manifest in a way that the suburban landscapes beyond the park's berm do not speak to the fact that Disneyland is real in a way that the rest of California can never be. The primary message of Disneyland's architecture is one of reassurance. All themed environments, whether dating from the Renaissance or newly built, are active primarily on an emotional level. They are places where our insecurities are met and our beliefs renewed. And when this landscape becomes suffocating, we can always walk down Main Street and out the gates.

Backup power: the phenomenon of replica Oval Offices

Just days after the most recent US election, before former President Bush could unpack his bags in Crawford, the first site plans were released for the new Bush Presidential Library. It will be constructed next to Southern Methodist University here in Dallas, and will apparently necessitate the bulldozing of my local bank branch. Perhaps this is a fitting postscript to Bush's presidency.

It's likely that the Bush Library will include a replica of the Oval Office as it appeared during his tenure in the White House. Most presidential libraries include Oval Offices, each a meticulous reconstruction of the Washington original as it appeared during a particular presidency, from the drapes to the doilies.

This begs the question: how many imitation Oval Offices exist? A quick search online reveals Oval Office replicas at the presidential libraries of Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Ford, Kennedy, Johnson, Truman, and FDR. Not to be outdone, Texas resident Ron Wade personally built an Oval Office next to his home. A fake Oval Office was temporarily constructed in at the Minneapolis Convention Centre in 2008 as a photo-op for tourists. As part of a marketing campaign in Washington, D.C. at the time of Obama's inauguration, IKEA slapped up a partial replica -- more a mockup -- of the Oval Office in Union Station, featuring, of course, IKEA bookshelves and other Scandinavian doodads in place of antique furniture.

Discounting the numerous reconstructions of the famous room for use as movie sets (including the elaborate, quasi-accurate set for TV's The West Wing), it's safe to say there are likely more than a dozen Oval Offices across the country and around the world. Like a company that keeps backups of crucial data at various sites in case of natural disaster, perhaps these shrines to democracy are part of a harebrained continuity-of-government scheme. America's fascination with the Oval Office has resulted in a redundancy that seems poignant given the nearly-averted airborne attack on the White House on 9/11. Would these backup Oval Offices serve as blueprints in the event of the original's destruction? Given that many of these replicas are decorated to accurately reflect the office's appearance during the term of a particular president, these imitation Oval Offices are perhaps more 'authentic' than the constantly-evolving version in Washington. With each departing president, the office generates a documentary artefact of its current state in the form of a duplicate. As long as presidents come and go, the Oval Office will continue to be a self-replicating system.

With this in mind, I shouldn't be too upset that the new Bush Library will displace my bank. Like the Oval Office, my bank has branches everywhere.

Architecture as story: Canada's pavilion at the Venice Biennale

What's the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words "Canada" and "building"? A log cabin, perhaps? While Canada lacks a defining architectural style, it has no shortage of structures that could pass as the archetypal Canadian building. I have a different suggestion.

The archetypal Canadian building is not the igloo nor the longhouse; not the CN Tower nor Habitat '67; not the Château Frontenac nor the Centre Block on Parliament Hill; it isn't even Red Green's Possum Lodge, nor Bob and Doug Mackenzie's house. The world's most Canadian building isn't even located in Canada. No, it's not the kitschy Canadian pavilion at Epcot, and it's not the bombastic Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. You'll find it in an overgrown, mostly forgotten corner of Venice, Italy. This one-story, unheated building -- more a glorified shelter -- is our nation's pavilion in Venice's Giardini Publici, the quiet public park that comes alive once every two years when it hosts one of the world's top art exhibitions, the Venice Biennale. The Giardini contains an eclectic assortment of national pavilions, giving the park the look of an overgrown world's fair.

The Canadian pavilion shares the grounds with pavilions from Korea, Norway, France, Venezuela, and about twenty-five others located in no particular order between groves of trees and along the gravel pathways. The pavilions were designed and built by the individual nations over the course of the past century, and thus proudly display the aesthetics and ambitions of their country at the time of their construction. Great Britain's entry is all columns and empire; the American pavilion is a Georgian mini-mansion; the imposing "Germania" pavilion looks like a design by Albert Speer, Hitler's architect. Picture the rich neighbourhood in every city where a Tudor-style mansion sits next to a Spanish monster house. If Disney's Epcot theme park had been built half a century earlier by the League of Nations, it surely would have looked like the Giardini Publici.

Canada's entry in this outdoor architecture museum was built in 1968 and says a great deal about the nation's identity and outlook as a young country coming into its own. Tucked in a far corner of the park -- appropriately to the right and slightly behind its colonial master Great Britain, Canada's diminutive pavilion is a low structure the size of a small bungalow and clad in dark red brick. The building sports a glass wall that faces onto an interior courtyard. Trees overhang the angular roof, and one grows up through the pavilion itself, the canopy erupting from an opening in the wood ceiling. The roof is defined by white steel beams rising to a central point, not-so-subtly evoking a tipi. "Canada" is spelled in capital letters beside the entrance, in a modern font that similarly identifies public schools of a similar vintage in Toronto. For a modest shelter -- one that bears a striking similarity to a washroom pavilion on the Toronto Islands -- the pavilion manages to cultivate a story of Canada as a country connected to nature, respectful of its First Nations roots, and modest yet proud of its accomplishments as a modern, postcolonial nation. In stark contrast to the Canada pavilion at Epcot which encompasses an embarrassing pastiche of Canadian clichés -- miniature Rocky Mountains next to a miniature Château Laurier, next to miniature totem poles -- the Canadian pavilion in the Giardini Publici acts like a concise, intelligent thesis statement for a nation ready to assume its role on the world stage. Like a frontier cabin or an embassy, the pavilion articulates Canada's story in a foreign land, and indeed tells that story with more coherence and grace than many of Canada's embassies and consulates abroad. Not bad for a tiny art gallery in a park.

In praise of the Gardiner: the unsung benefits
of Toronto's waterfront highway

If you've never been to Toronto, imagine a nasty, noisy highway snaking its way through the downtown core on a procession of decaying columns, like an overlong abandoned factory with the walls blown out. Now imagine the tonnage of ink employed by politicians, community leaders, and concerned citizens (but notably, not the concerned citizens of the Automobile Association) to denounce this relic and to call for its demolition. You now have a sense of Toronto's Gardiner Expressway that is second only to actually driving along its deck as it weaves between buildings, like Billy's dotted lines in The Family Circus. Once meant to be the most southern swoop of a network of freeways that would have crisscrossed the city, the Gardiner now ends abruptly on the eastern edge of downtown. The recent upswell in civic awareness among Torontonians, combined the gentrification of downtown, has resulted in a surge of support for the Gardiner's downfall. In this particular case, though, and for the first and last time, I must align myself with the Automobile Association and impatient drivers everywhere: I believe the Gardiner Expressway should stay put. Here's why.

First off, it's a blast. The view from the deck of the Gardiner offers a fantastic and novel view of downtown. Forget the observation deck at the CN Tower; this is the real postcard view of the city. With new condo towers sprouting along its route mere feet away from the lanes of traffic, a ride along the Gardiner feels like a commute through Tommorrowland.

One of the main rallying cries of those who seek its demolition is that the Gardiner cuts the city off from Lake Ontario, a block or two south of the highway's path. My experience is that it is the wide railway embankment just beside the Gardiner that is the true barrier, and that any surface road that would replace the elevated highway would be just as much of an obstacle. In fact, the aforementioned wall of condo towers is much more of a physical barrier between Torontonians and their waterfront than the soaring highway.

Finally, the spaces created underneath the Gardiner -- wide swaths of vacant land with the highway overhead serving as a cathedral ceiling -- are actually sublime and ripe for creative occupation. The highway's verticality itself is an urban asset, offering a contrast to the unending horizontality of Toronto's suburbs, and a counterpart to Toronto's other ceiling, the web of streetcar cables over the main streets.

One plan I uncovered through research for my Toronto Pending thesis was a scheme to 'urbanize' the Gardiner; that is, to build under, around, and even over the expressway, creating new, unusual, and creative spaces for people to walk, play, shop, and even live.

I realize that this sentiment runs contrary to the anti-car spirit of the age. Boston tore down its version of the Gardiner Expressway, and even though it cost a fortune and took forever. I have little doubt that Toronto will eventually follow suit. Right now, the Gardiner's only saviour is the generally speedy flow traffic along its deck and the glacial pace of politics in the city through which it weaves.