Tonight we're gonna party like its 1939

Mid-Century Modernism is my favorite period in architecture. Modernism is a transitional design idiom that takes us from Art Deco and is a precursor to the International Style. I am always uplifted by the sense of optimism that Modernist buildings display. They are often grand and corporate but are never infused with the Ozymandian portent that International Style buildings instantly generate due to their inhuman scale.

Like Art Deco before it, Mid-Century Modernism had strong design cues and could be executed with economy with a simple superstructure clad in a few details executed with glamourous materials. Put away that marble – we're going with terrazzo! All of this gave the effect of great style at the lowest possible cost. It was therefore possible for any architect in almost any burgh to propose a Modernist building for a new build. Mid-Century Modernism was also perfectly suited for that most common low-cost high style Mid-Century build – the shopping mall.

Growing up in a small City with a Pop. of 250,000 I was not exposed to a great number of international design movements. But Modernism was everywhere. And I remember the sense of occasion one had going to these buildings. They were slick, clean and up-to-date. There were escalators or elevators. One was always the newest medical building. Just walking in the front door you new they would have the latest advances in medical technology. Whatever ailed you would soon be cured.

Then there were the City's two shopping malls, both executed in Modernist style. What is more exciting to a young person, or anyone, than a trip to a shopping Valhalla? And finally, in the 1960s all apartment towers were being executed in the chic Modernist style.

My real passion for Mid-Century Modernism is what I have named the “Pavilion Style”. In the Canadian City of Toronto there is an entire complex of fairground buildings called the Canadian National Exhibition. These are a fairgrounds so old that once a Crystal Palace was the main structure.

And before all of those things was the 1939 New York's Worlds Fair. And recently an amazing series of “electric city” style nocturnal time exposures has emerged. Breathtaking!

The story is great, but I recommend scrolling half-way down the page to the photo gallery. Read the story afterword and you will appreciate it more.

Of Mies and Mien

Just before my illness I was on secondment in Minneapolis-St Paul [MSP], a ridiculous long moniker for a city that we in Canada would just call Welland. Arriving in Downtown MSP the first thing you notice is that there are NO buildings in the International Style. This immediately tells you that from sometime in the 1950s until the 1990s the town was in decline. Even my home town of St Catharines [Pop 280,000] has a building representing that period.

Today's Google Doodle celebrates the greatest International Style architect of all time, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies to his friends. Le Corbusier is a vastly superior visionary, but he never built anything, so that rules him out. Philip Johnson comes close, but his primary contribution is that he moved the International Style into Post Modernism

A little known fact about Mies is that he never lived in his own buildings. For living he adored luxurious fin de siècle 19th Century architecture, so he lived more like Jules Verne than George Jetson, whilst designing buildings whose vernacular is still as fresh as the latest pop song.

Mies has more than a few Canadian connections. Phyllis Lambert, the Bronfman heir, gave Mies his greatest commission in the Seagram Building in Manhattan.

The Toronto Dominion Centre is essentially a clone of that project. Although it is gradually being eroded. The shopping Mezzanine has been destroyed by renovations. However Shawn Micallef tantalizingly informs us there's a Mies van der Rohe-designed Cinema mothballed somewhere in that complex.

My favorite, and the gem I save for last, is that he designed an Esso Station in a suburb of Montreal. This is an almost inconceivable marvel. Imagine a Daniel Liesbkind Chrystal Harvey's in Newmarket. No, really, that's what we're talking about. A purely functional building for a chain franchise in an unremarkable place. Designed and built by the greatest architect of his time at the height of his powers.

Needless to say the owners attempted to demolish it in 2008. Fortunately it was built somewhere French, where culture is air, and the community refused to demolish, somehow acquired it, and it is now a community centre.

Mise à jour - La Station: bâtiment public intergénérationnel