Architectural Tourism in a Time of Pandemic
Shelley Hornstein
What is it about architecture, and heritage in particular, that beckons us to travel? And what changes when we are forced into virtual experiences of place? Through an exploration of a discarded modernist monument, Ontario Place in Toronto, Shelley Hornstein considers how we might use virtual tools and new perspectives on travel and tourism to reinvigorate the physical site, and proposes that imagination is precisely what is needed to harness their cultural, historic and social qualities.
During the notorious pandemic days we have had to endure in lockdown — offset somewhat by the promise of vaccinations — thoughts of travel to places we might want to visit seem at once near and still so very far away. The concepts of shelter, sheltering in place, and home have taken on new meanings. And the idea of communing with architecture in person — bodily, sensorially — seems as insurmountable and imaginary as visiting a castle in the sky.
And yet, immersed in our private spheres of spatiality, we continue to dream, and have been reading and watching on screens more than ever before about the places we yearn to see in situ. And, more specifically: elsewhere, in other spatial spheres. As such, the verb, to travel, has become a robust, embodied action that we aim to vivify. And while we wait in this suspended zone of being, we resort to pretending — a different bodily action — that calls up the imagination. If we want to be stretching forth from here and now to there, that is, in some future geography, how and when, we might ask ourselves, will we take up a journey?
In this awkwardly prorogued moment, can the intangible world of online sites, magazine photographs and articles, television series and movies, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms of communication stand in for physical travel? Is it possible to explore the world, no passports needed? [1] Certainly it allays any hesitation on our part to dive in and, as a recent New York Times article describes it, ‘Pretend You’re in Paris Tonight’. As it continues: ‘There are countless ways to invite Paris into your home. All you need is a little creativity. And perhaps a glass of Champagne.’ [2] Yet it’s worth noting that what sells that message is the crushingly glorious full-screen photographic spread of an architectural twilight panorama comprising the Palais de la Cité, the Pont au Change, and an embankment of the Seine River. These are iconic images, if not immediately identifiable, of quintessentially and enduring Parisian architectural sites.
Taj Mahal, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India, 2016. Photo: Shelley Hornstein.
Therefore, while we cannot be mobile in the way we once knew, and there is nothing to replace the experience of ‘being there’ and the total corporeal immersion of our sentient beings in a place, still, as the New York Times piece suggests, because of our desire to see other places, we can embrace alternate forms of travel experiences. What we grasp visually and absorb as we turn a corner, and possibly simultaneously synthesise the successive or seamless images as we peregrinate in a place, are steps of discovery. There are countless ways to integrate and layer experiences of place, even by bluffing actual travel and the re-locating of oneself. It is in considering heritage that we cannot touch or see in situ, the intangible evidence of history and culture, of social interaction, of ideas, of sensory spaces, of knowledge and belief systems, of memory and more. And although Maurice Halbwachs writes of how collective memory is anchored in spatial frameworks, it is how we interpret these spatialities of which he speaks, that brings us to what we cannot — necessarily — touch and see. In short, the intangibles of travel have everything to do with that which enrobes the physicality of place, and is knowable outside of the materiality of place. So much of this is made known to us through our perambulations, our movement, our mobility. In short, everything architecture is, and everything we know of its material qualities is only part of the picture. Its reality is mediated by the mobility of our body and mind.
In one of the chapters of my latest book, Architectural Tourism; Site-Seeing, Itineraries and Cultural Heritage, I ask ‘What if, through augmented reality and other forms of digital touring, visitors could create stories about derelict spaces and stagnant architectural compounds to incite urban redevelopment, and thus tourism, through new visionary models? How do we imagine architectural tourism through intangible heritage? What might it mean to pay special attention to the evolving conversation between the tourist industry and its audiences about architecture as a fixed physical place and digital interventions in urban space that move in and out of physical place?’ I explore what it means to drift through online sites on architecture and design, but specifically those dedicated to monuments. Overall, I set out to demonstrate how architecture is what beckons us to travel. Not always, of course, but more often than we realise, and sometimes as a largely covert operation. That is, while we dream away and imagine what it might be like to visit say, India, what is likely to occur is that somewhere in our visual archive is an image of the Taj Mahal.
Eberhard Zeidler, Cinesphere (1971), Ontario Place, Toronto. Photo: Andreea Muscurel and The Future of Ontario Place Project.
With this in mind, a recent and topical example is worth exploring as a way to expand the model I propose in the book. There are many sites that have been forgotten, fallen into disrepair, been destroyed, demolished, or are simply waiting, in abeyance, for a reactivation into our present lives. To consider these sites is another form of travelling because they are, at least currently, intangible, unknowable, in bodily experientiality. One such example is Ontario Place in Toronto, Canada, a Modernist monument designed by architect Eberhard Zeidler and landscape architect Michael Hough in 1971, on the heels of the success of Montreal’s Expo 67.
An expansive Toronto waterfront project envisioned as parkland on artificial islands on the shores of Lake Ontario, it would house Cinesphere, the first permanent IMAX theatre; the Forum (an outdoor amphitheatre); a Children’s Village playscape designed by Eric McMillan; and landscapes of native trees and subspecies. Initially, the objective was to offer a summer retreat park for those without access to cottages and green space. Now a heritage icon at risk, its future is at stake and activism is drumming up through the World Monuments Fund, the Architectural Conservancy Ontario, and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto, as well as the Future of Ontario Place organisation, to ensure its protection, re-activating its current intangible status to one of tangibility, through a competition for its rebirth — most of it has been mothballed since 2011. The projected idea of this site and how it will function is decidedly braided together with its touristic future, however unwittingly. While the fundamentals of its program considered the local population as its first catchment of potential visitors to the site, what evolved over time was the touristic reach of the place and the architectural importance of its design environment. Over the last decade, its memory has been progressively reactivated for those who experienced it as well as for those who see its haunting physical presence on the city waterfront. It is an architectural monument that created a futuristic program for recreational activity now largely vacated and ghosted, yet its material qualities loom large. On the one hand, conservationists and activists imagine a renaissance so that its iconicity can be at once protected, enhanced, and given life again. On the other, its monumentality, and its current status as site-on-hold, as it were, both by scale and by memory, deserves a reanimated presence. Its future value will be a magnet for tourism and play a leading role in attracting tourists as well as locals. Tourism and architectural iconicity rather than being antagonists are not mutually exclusive. Iconic architecture typifies a place, a cluster of cultural, historic, and social qualities and ultimately, as Leslie Sklair has put it, ‘may create genuinely democratic public spaces in which the culture-ideology of consumerism fades away’. [3]
What does this mean, then, for the tourism aspect of intangible heritage and the impossibility of travelling in the way we are accustomed, even within our own cities? The forms of presentation of what lies ahead for Ontario Place are decidedly virtual: Zoom panel talks; YouTube archival presentations (for instance, one online currently by Michael Hough from 1979); articles describing the history and heritage value of Ontario Place (see Azure magazine in particular [4]); and Twitter, Instagram and other forms of social media devoted to the Future of Ontario Place Project. These digital architectonic environments for information dissemination (text, audio and visual primarily) are powerful tools that have an important impact for international travel, both virtual and physical, and continue to feed our experiential understanding, however distanced, of what a physical site cannot necessarily achieve on its own. While Suitcase; The Culture of Travel magazine suggests that travellers might fit into certain categories — The Grounded Spirit, The Good Lifer, The Gourmand, The Urbanite, The Soul Searcher or The Explorer — what remains true in each is the desire by the tourist to seek out objects that shape space, whether natural formations or built forms. Such objects are anchored in locations that always define a territory and give outlines — definitions — materially, to the planet for those who crave to be transported to and within it. If the pandemic sheltering-in-place has taught us anything at all aside from patience and pausing, it is the pervasiveness of architecture in our mind’s eye, and the ability for us to imagine a recoverable world into which we can immerse ourselves unconditionally.
1. Lauren Reddy, ‘Exploring Cultures of the World, No Passports Required’, New York Times, 24 November 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/insider/world-at-home.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage. Accessed 11 January 2021.
2. Stephanie Rosenbloom, ‘How to Pretend You’re in Paris Tonight’, 17 November 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/travel/paris-vacation-at-home.html?smid=pi-nytimes&smtyp=cur. Accessed 15 January 2021.
3. Leslie Sklair, ‘Iconic Architecture and the Culture-ideology of Consumerism’, Theory, Culture, and Society,
vol. 27 no. 5, pp. 135—59.
4. ‘The Future of Ontario Place: Towards an Inclusive Preservation Dialogue’, Azure, 9 October 2020. Accessed 12 January 2021. https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/the-future-of-ontario-place-towards-an-inclusive-preservation-dialogue/
Shelley Hornstein is Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar of Architectural History and Visual Culture at York University, Canada. Her latest book, Architectural Tourism: Site-Seeing, Itineraries and Cultural Heritage, is available now from Lund Humphries.
