THE VISION
I want to suggest that this special condensing of consciousness has found
expression in seven [7] recent architectonic constructions tightly gathered
in the built core of the city and standing aloft of the Earth's surface
in a communication with the sky. Most of these constructions would be named
skyscrapers in the current architectonic lexicon, but I prefer for the
purposes of this inquiry to use the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's
words and call these sky beacons or archi-skylons!
Since 1969, four potent
banking archi-skylons have been erected near the intersection of King and
Bay Streets. Their altitudes and the harmonic colours of their skins betray
a beautiful confirmation of the relationship among the four races and the
resonance of the six directions of aboriginal cosmology: 1] in the west
[place of the ancestors and the black race], Mies van der Rohe's Toronto-Dominion
Centre of 1969, is a noble addressing of twentieth century grief and loss,
evoked in stoic and elegant black facades which are repositories for grief;
2] in the north [place of wisdom and the white race], Edward Durell Stone
designed the tallest of these buildings for the Bank of Montreal, and chose
white marble for its primary cladding; 3] in the south [place of trust and
the yellow race], the Royal Bank rises in a double tier with intricately
folded facades clad in glass tinted with pure gold, rendering the crystalline
facades yellow in the morning sun; 4] in the east [the place of return and
the red race], the Bank of Nova Scotia, surmounted by an inverted triangular
pictogram cast into its peak and directed earthward [5], faced with indigenous
Quebec ochre granite.
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