- art critic John Bentley Mays
But how can a city be pretentious? People who've been to France might consider that a stupid question, but seriously; remove the people from a city and how do you classify its character?
Here's a test I devised today: look at condos.
Condos are fast becoming the bellwether of unbearable pretentiousness in this city. Today while walking along King Street, I saw the site of a new building called Gläs.
Fucking Gläs? What is that?
Several months ago, I went to a friend of a friend's apartment, situated in a building called Element. Upon seeing this sign, we both immediately remarked on the ridiculousness of the name. Aside from the fact that the building probably contains things found on the periodic table, there's no decent reason to call it Element.
That one struck me as stupid, but harmless. But as time goes on (and it has), I've noticed more and more. Here's a sampling of some other names I've seen lately:
Icon
Solara
Crystal Blu
Zenith
The New Yorker (in Toronto, natch)
Infinity
Names like this serve no purpose but to make the building sound cooler, allowing for inflated prices. Some people are likely willing to pay more to live at Crystal Blu than 66 Anywhere St., even if they're exactly the same. But those people are worthless, so who cares what they think?
Because I have nothing else to do, I spent a touch of time deconstructing the idea of naming your building something ridiculous like Gläs. Here's what I got:
Glas is Swedish for glass. But neither the architect nor engineers behind Gläs is Swedish.
It sure as hell isn't some tongue-in-cheek kind of joke. Condos and cars are some of the most humorless products there are (As an aside, it's worth noting that Element, New Yorker and Solara are also car names. So is Infinity, but, like Gläs, it's intentionally misspelled for maximum hipness: Infiniti).
That name is the deformed brainchild of a numbskulled marketing exec looking for something hip-sounding. He was shopping at IKEA one day and saw something made of glas, and thought "Wow, that' s so hip-sounding!" But it's too pedestrian to name a building after an IKEA product, so he throws an umlaut over it in hopes that it'll sound cooler. By adding it, he instantly makes it meaningless and throws credibility out the window for two reasons: 1) a real word would be more meaningful and 2) umlauts have not been trendy or cool since Mötley Crüe deployed them to similarly pointless effect.
But enough about Gläs and back to my original point: these names are nothing but awful, pretentious idiocy. Giving a residential building some hip name is completely pointless.
Here's a bet: try getting into a cab in Toronto and saying "Take me to Gläs." If the can driver actually knows what you mean and takes you there without rolling his eyes and smacking you upside the head, I'll give you $20. And then I'll smack you upside the head.
Canada and Toronto have an established history of boring names. Canada is just Iroquois for "village" and Toronto is Mohawk for "where there are trees standing in the water." Man, those natives sure can tell it like it is! Two of the city's most high-profile buildings have devastatingly boring-ass names: the Rogers Centre (neé SkyDome, a far more majestic name) and the CN Tower. Know what the CN stands for? Canada's National. Some cities have The Louvre, The Hermitage or the Prado and we have the Art Gallery of Ontario. Inspired names are not our style!
So I guess the important question is this: are these names just part of Toronto's desperate need for pizzaz? Well, I'm willing to bet that your average condo marketing idiot doesn't know the etymology of Canada and Toronto, nor do they care about the names of existing structures here, so they're just being a bunch of pretentious fucking dicks.
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