Each year, Doors Open has been getting less and less appealing. The problem is that there just aren’t that many interesting architecural buildings in Toronto, at least not enough that I can appreciate. Plus the really interesting ones are never participating since it would hurt their tourist revenue.

This year, the only place I really wanted to check out was the Indian temple at 427/Finch. The BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha Mandir looks very intricate whenever I pass it on the 427, and I learned that it was carved by 18000 artisans over 18 months, and constructed without any structural ferrous materials.

The distance from which I normally viewed this building made it seem very finely constructed. But in fact it’s not as detailed. What is amazing is the craftsman ship that is involved to make one of these mandirs, and it seems like there are many spread out over India and the world. It puts Chinese temples to shame.

After that, we headed over to the Don Jail. This was the first (and last) year that it would be an exhibit. I was worried that it would be a huge line to get in, but fortunately we didn’t run into that problem. In fact we couldn’t get into the line at all since they had already let in enough people at 12:30 to last until 4pm!

After lunch we headed up to the Ontario Association of Architects. I’ve passed this building many times on Don Mills, and it is nicely lit up at night. It was a poor place to visit for Doors Open however, because all they had were a couple of posters which were vying for a design award! They didn’t even have any information about the building or the association! What a waste of time.

Doors Open in 2008
Doors Open in 2007
Doors Open in 2002

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: religion, toronto