Brick Facade: a short rant about Architecture

I get kind of sad when I look at the old Toronto stock exchange building. It's one of the last and only left standing, Art Deco buildings. The front doors are beautiful geometric depictions of men at work mirroring each other. 

A large mural spans across the entire width of the building. Depicting Construction crews marching in row carrying equipment. Advanced tools and machinery among airplanes and cars all scribed on this huge stone artwork. 

All possible within three layers 

My favorite, The little stars from the impact of metal tools in a forgery. All of these workers all headed together with the same goal. 

To build a better future. 

Then you look up and notice the giant metal glass tower, its mirror cascade trying to hide its hundreds of meters height, artificially mimicking the colours of sunset and sunrise. I lose sight of the sky and I get the strangest feeling as if I was suddenly deep underground, being buried alive. The new growth covering what would have been the rest of the building is foreign in every way. The original stock exchange building was made of stone, with different brick laying techniques used and even the windows planned in exact to line up further in symmetry and it was handled much like an artwork as many architectural projects were.

Architecture used to be an artform of the grandest proportions. I don't feel any sense of joy or interest when I look behind its brick facade, just emptiness. If you count that lonely feeling as an evoking emotion, then you'd have your way.

What do I notice about the new addition? I first noticed it fails to keep the original symmetry, bulging out too far left and stretching upwards in a dizzying repetitive sequence of confined squares. Broken up around the old building with a different pattern on each row, not even attempting to accommodate it, making it look and feel “in the way.”

When I look at it I see a corpse with an invasive species growing from its body. Its blinding lights during daylight like the prey lure on deep sea angler fish and at night in dark purple, blues and reds with sickly yellow insides like an infection left too long or a deep, painful bruise. 

Art Deco style  will be a hundred years old soon, i'll be around to mark that moment. Its makers have long since passed but I wonder if they'd like the new building as it stands now? Most of their hard work is covered up, hell, even the mural piece is blocked but awkward streetlights that dont even illuminate the art at night. You've been left to view it in literary pieces. in between thin curved black lines and advertisement banners. 

I didn't even need to add a metaphor here, the city did it for me. 

Obscuring the last of an entire artistic and architectural movement is factory produced, defunct streetlight whose only active purpose now is to hold advertisements.