I made some Torontoist commenters angry, last week, with
a throwaway comment about some concrete apartment towers. I inserted a quick description of them while I was casting about for ways of describing the terrain surrounding a small parkette in the Annex. The towers were erected in the sixties, and look their age. I called them "tacky," and then a commenter, named adHominem, called me a
philistine. And then others agreed with him. And then I responded to say that I wouldn't say anything else on the topic, which probably would have been the best course of action, but uh... oh well.
This was the particular building that was most prominent in my mind as I was writing: 44 Walmer Road.
Completed in 1969 and now sometimes called the "flower tower," it's thirteen stories high, with semi-circular balconies that stack around its floors like Frisbees, and a fountain in front that's decorated with a pair of flared, flying arches. New construction techniques had made it possible to use concrete to literally pour multi-story edifices into being from the ground up, cheaply and quickly; 44 Walmer was a beneficiary of that. To me, the building recalls nothing so much as an oversized resort motel. There are six more buildings that are similarly styled, all within a few blocks (and
many others throughout the city). I lived in the area for about eight months and had always assumed that this was just the way people were building large apartment buildings in the Annex during the sixties. But no. It turns out that they were all designed by one guy—a kind of auteur of kitchy designs for high-density living. His name was Uno Prii.
I hadn't heard of Prii before his name came up in the comments on my post. After a little research, I have to admit that dismissing the buildings as tacky was glib. I might at least have made myself aware of Prii's name, and the existence of his following.
He has a following.
One of the earliest mentions of Prii in a major Toronto newspaper came In 1964, when the
Globe sent a reporter to write a lifestyle piece about Prii's home, at 22 Taylor Drive, and his use of stained oak as a design element there. Stained oak had fallen out of favor with designers because of its associations with fussy, old-world Victoriana, and the article uses this fact to cast its subject as a rebel. Prii told the reporter that all the stained oak in his home had been salvaged from an old staircase. "The staircase," says the article, "had been in a house at 44 Walmer Rd., built around the turn of the century for the late Edward Gurney. Following the sale of the house by the Gurney estate it was used as a rooming house until it was pulled down to make room for a high-rise apartment being designed by Mr. Prii."
It's telling that the home torn down to accommodate the apartment building at 44 Walmer was being used as a rooming house. This was a property speculation trick―one that used to be so common in Toronto that it had a name: blockbusting. Blockbusting involved buying a home, then turning it, temporarily, into a rooming house. The buyer would earn rent from the rooming house while performing minimal repairs, until a high-rise developer could be found to buy the property. By the mid-seventies the City and province had both passed legislation to help curtail the practice. Blockbusting is part of the reason Toronto now restricts the heights of new buildings. (I owe everything I know about blockbusting to
this excellent essay.)
None of this explains how Prii became a local celebrity. The first admiring mention of his work that I was able to locate came in 1983, from
Globe columnist Zena Cherry, who called Prii's newly-completed Alan Brown Building, at 77 Elm St., "a beautiful sculpture."
Prii also had vocal detractors. The following year, the Globe's Adele Freedman selected 77 Elm as a stop on her "eyesore tour" of Toronto. The tour also included the Atrium on Bay and the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
In 1998, 44 Walmer was the recipient of megatons of snark from Toronto Life, who wrote, in a feature titled "Edifice Dreck":
It was 1963. Men had blasted into space, baby boomers were moving out,
and the recently divorced were looking for fresh new digs. Architect Uno
Prii designed these apartments to reflect the futuristic momentum of
the time, but when he found out that a turn-of-the-century mansion was
sitting on the site, he pleaded with developers to let the residence
remain. It wasn't to be--swinging singles needed homes, and Prii
delivered in appropriately groovy fashion.
In 1999, just a year before Prii's death, his reputation in the press began to resuscitate.
Taddle Creek ran a piece with a long, admiring section devoted to his work. That same year, the
Star ran a profile of Prii, tracing him back to his origins in Tallinn, Estonia. Prii fled his home to avoid Soviet occupation and spent time in a few different Scandinavian countries. In 1950, he moved to Toronto with his wife Silvia and enrolled at U of T to study architecture.
The most touching part of the
Star profile is at the very end:
Silvia Prii said that before they settled into their Bloor St. condominium they had considered moving into 44 Walmer Rd., one of the downtown rental buildings her husband designed.
"It is a very joyous building," said Prii of the design, with its flowing curved terraces. "I thought it would have been such a joyous place to come home to."
But the Priis found out that not only was the building fully occupied, it had a waiting list. Silvia, a retired fine arts librarian with the Toronto Public Library, is sure her husband's design was the reason for the demand.
"Uno is an original," she said. "The Bauhaus is famous and I have nothing against the Bauhaus, but they couldn't accept that architects could have floating lines and imagination. For me, it is a great pleasure when people say, 'Oh, yes. Uno Prii. I know his buildings.' Once you see them you don't forget them."
Uno Prii worked for developers, but he was evidently motivated by more than profit. Willingness to live inside one's work isn't characteristic of hacks; it's the mark of a nobler type of spirit.
His buildings do have a very fine sense of humor, especially in comparison to most of the other sixties and seventies apartment buildings in the area. My apartment building, when I lived in the neighborhood, was not a Prii building; it was a stark concrete block with a lobby that smelled like potpourri, its only decoration a vase of fake flowers atop a fake marble table. The lobby at Prii's "Vincennes" apartment building (35 Walmer Road), meanwhile, features sleek vintage couches and setees in rust orange, with abstract sculptures in complementary colors hanging from the walls. There are end tables with ornate brassy lamps. It's a setup that wouldn't be out of place behind glass at the ROM, or on the set of Mad Men. Unfortunately, as many commentators have noted, the exteriors of most of Prii's Annex buildings are starting to crumble due to landlord neglect.
After Prii died, in 2000, his public profile continued to rise, beginning with an article-length obit in the
Star. In 2001, the owner of 44 Walmer renovated its balconies, and replaced the original patterned barriers with glass ones, prompting
outcry from the Annex Gleaner, from the author of the 1999
Taddle Creek article. (The linked article is a reprint, from
Taddle Creek.)
Two years later, 44 Walmer and fifteen other Prii buildings in Toronto were up for inclusion on the City's inventory of heritage properties. Thirteen of them, including 44 Walmer, were ultimately added. In 2004, the
Globe ran an article headlined "The king of 60s kitsch gets noticed," in which John Shnier of Kohn Shnier Architects is quoted as saying, of Prii: "His work was entirely misunderstood and underappreciated at the time...His buildings are liberating, soaring, expressive forms."
Joe Lobko, then chair of the Toronto Society of Architects, also quoted in the
Globe article, was more moderate in his praise: "They have a certain flare to them. I don't know that I could tolerate a city full of Uno Priis but I'm glad there are some."
In 2006, the
Globe's David LeBlanc declared that "
Uno Prii's bold buildings are gaining a devoted following," wondered aloud "why his story and body of work aren't being taught to first-year architecture students," and then finished by comparing Prii to Frank Lloyd Wright.
On the other hand, Christopher Hume, architecture critic for the
Star, concluded a 2008 article with
a casual jab at Prii's Annex buildings, saying: "Those apartment buildings designed by Uno Prii may be interesting as architecture, but they're hopelessly inappropriate in this context." There are no comments on the article, so it's hard to know whether or not Hume was called to account for his anti-Uno attitude.
Last year, U of T's Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design staged a retrospective of Prii's entire oeuvre, entitled "
Sculpted Envelopes: The Architecture of Uno Prii." This sparked another
Globe article from David LeBlanc, along with some other local press coverage.
By June of last year, Prii's reputation had solidified to the point that the
Star was describing him as "legendary Estonian-Canadian architect Uno Prii." Legendary or no, Google doesn't yield up any mentions of Prii's name by international press organs, except for a few archived New York Times articles from the sixties, none of which appear to be by architecture critics.
Prii left a discernible mark on Toronto, and he was clearly an artisan. His work has a consistent style that could only be the product of a determined, uncompromising architectural sensibility. He said in interviews that this sensibility had lost him commissions. That's real sacrifice, and it deserves respect.
But his Annex buildings are still tacky. They're tacky in the sense that their design dates them to a particular decade, when swooping parabolic arches still had space-age resonances not rooted entirely in Star Trek reruns. They were designed by an artist, but built out of inexpensive materials to serve the expediences of the sixties rental market by luring in tenants with flourishes that may then have seemed chic, but haven't worn well.
The thing about tackiness, though, is that fully realized it can achieve its own type of grace. The world is full of good art and its imitators, and a lot of the imitators are unintentionally terrible and boring. Unabashedly terrible art is rare and different, and for that reason it's precious. In any case, you get used to it.
