Moorish Revival, with a twist

On Church Street, the former Athenaeum Club has incorporated
its "Moorish Revival" style onto a condo's facade.

I've consistently said that Canadians are either very naive or deeply irresponsible. A recent article I came across from Spacing Toronto entitled "Toronto meets Marrakesh" leads me to think that the sin lies in irresponsibility.

The online blog, which is part of a print edition, describes itself thus:

Spacing Toronto is your hub for daily dispatches from the streets of Toronto to cities around the world, offering both analysis and a forum for discussion. Our contributors examine city hall, architecture, urban planning, public transit, transportation infrastructure and just about anything that involves the public realm of our cities.

Clearly a blog and magazine that tries to understand the urban landscape of cities across Canada.

But, the writer of "Toronto Meets Marrakesh", Thomas Wicks, is incapable of differentiating between a benign, and even flourishing, urban landscape, and that which is endangered.

European and American artists have always had a fascination for foreign cultures, from African masks, to Chinese ceramics to exotic "Moorish" styles. Often, they lived in these cultures for some time, or spent years traveling back and forth, while borrowing from, and being inspired by, their alien friends.

Still, the bottom line has always been that they never transformed their societies with these strange and foreign elements. Whatever they brought, somehow and not always tidily, fit into their European or American environments.

Wicks' great description of the Toronto landscape of the early 20th century, when there was a general Moorish Revival through architecture, art and design, shows that many of these elements (they were actually very few) somehow blended in, albeit a little incongruously, with the rest of the city, and Toronto went on being Toronto and nothing fundamental changed.

Yet, Wicks' attempt to favorably compare the latest "Moorish" incursion with the original one is completely erroneous and dangerous.

There is no Moorish Re-Revival. There are no artists and architects who, enchanted by these faraway lands, tried to bring a little of that exoticism back to their hometown.

What we have now is actual "Moors" right here, who are adamant about changing the landscape to fit their world view. They are not building mosques and minarets as quaint additions to a northern city, but as buildings which will transform this city. There will not be one or two buildings dispersed here and there, but whole regions which will be under the visual and aural spell of this new landscape.

Wicks appears to be a regular writer for Spacing Toronto. I hold him responsible for his myopia and wrong analogies, since he appears to be a professional. He will be directly responsible for the innocent bystander who will have to hear chants five times daily from the minaret that was built just across his home. And even if he moves to another place, a new one is sure to rise up again.

Canadians are certainly not naive. They have ample evidence, information and proof. They are ultimately profoundly irresponsible to their society, their environment and their landscape.