Brookfield Place: Architecture is Sculpture

I sit in a sculpture that is architecture. White-painted iron arches and ribs repeat over the walkway like a riot of infinite regressions in a mirror. Distorting glass windows over the archways bounce light and reflect the architectural columns in permutated ways. Looking at the rounded arch of white ribs through the glass which is divided into sections by frames it feels as if we’re in the skeleton of an old boat, itself a rendition of a ribcage lit from within the belly of a whale, a huge beast basking in the sun pouring through the glass sky as it rolls through the waves.

The sound of French café music, slightly jazz, sensual, romantic, and a fountain spraying, pouring add to the surreal experience.

Rich forkful by forkful I eat a Napoleon, vanilla cream custard, flake pastry, fresh strawberries, with a smooth yet bitter coffee. My dessert swims in its vanilla cream on a large platter on an outdoor iron table and I am seated in a wicker chair that rests on a floor of polished field stone tiles. Large planters holding Ficus trees and other foliage line the edge of the patio - like a street café in Valencia, or any cosmopolitan European city. There are green and red and yellow canvas umbrellas over some of the tables.

Is this decoration, or does it serve a purpose in the glass-filtered sun? The sun that makes my netbook screen almost impossible to clearly see. The same dancing light is on my lap. I take cell phone photographs.

Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect, sculptor and engineer designed Brookfield Place in downtown Toronto. There are resemblances to the Eaton Centre, and I discover in an Internet search that a Canadian architectural firm, Bregman & Haman, constructed both.

An old bank building, in restored condition, is one of the buildings inside the glass structure and which you pass as if you were walking down a pedestrian-only street. Once it was whipped by winds and ice or baked in the hot Summer sun, now it dwells within a light-filled architectual sculpture. Is this a futuristic rendition of the bubbles that might contain our cities of the future? The old building stands without mourning the loss of rain or windborne air, as if realizing a dream of a protected and peaceful existence.

We walk past the building from another century over glass squares of radiating light.



Light resplendent above and below us.