THE VISION
More recently Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill designed the BCE Place, linked
by the woodland evocation of the great white steel ceremonial concourse
designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, to join the forces
of gender paired towers. The taller of these rises as a great phallic lingam
attenuated in a red beacon light, bathed in the white ether condensate generated
in the building's cleansing cycles. The triangular configuration of the
upper stories directs your attention skyward [6]. The feminine addressing
to this virile icon is an adjacent broad hipped tower terminating in a double
breasted pinnacle at a lower elevation.
The men and the women occupy their
traditional places on either side of this great east-west Longhouse. These
towers surround a fifth element the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce tower
by I.M. Pei which personifies the silver covenant chain of agreement between
the Hotinonshon:ni and their allies the British who founded the modern city
as an outpost of empire.
The sixth element in this sacred heptad is nearer
the water and to the west - the tallest free standing construction on the
planet - the CN Tower erected in 1976 as a great sending ane receiving device
- an ancestral beckoning shamanic staff - rising in an aspiring 553.33 metres.
Its pinnacle is poignant in the limits of its diaphanous reach.
At its base
is the great circular Sky Dome lodge, or mother womb, with a retractable
roof opening and closing to the star field in the gathering events of the
people! Each of these seven architectures reaches deeply into the Mother
Earth, risen in shrill elicitation to the sky and gazing outward into the
spirits of the four directions.
Evoking the ancestors of the four great
races - red, yellow, black, and white. The suggestive urban assembly, which
is the Toronto skyline, is unconsciously streaming ancestral memory, inherent
the indigenous understanding of time, form, and space. This profound remembrance
is being nurtured in the enclave of Toronto urban community, manifested
and conveyed in a prophetic architectonic distillation!
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