Spacing Wire is one of my favourite blogs. It’s all about public space and partly about Toronto but mostly about public space. Back on April 15, they had a post about the transforming properties of architecture and cited Lisa Rochon who said:
These days, in the city of Toronto, architecture is understood as a major transformer. At times, large-scale urban design has taken on a spectacular dimension, delivered as a jaw-dropping provocation, an object to behold, the latest, stupefying commodity. But public architecture also resides more quietly, enduringly, within the deep folds of a city’s fabric, in that zone of the glorious in-between. It is found in life-sustaining libraries and in community centres that invite openness and tolerance and a just society.
That’s right: life-sustaining libraries. Thank-you Lisa Rochon. If you want to read the full text of her article go here. You’ll see that you can’t actually get to the full-text, which brings me to the point I was intending to make in the first place.
One thing I keep going back to the Spacing blog for is their link to Bug Me Not. BMN is where you can go and borrow other folks’ usernames and passwords to get onto password-protected mass media sites (including, for example, the New York Times, and, of course, the Globe). So go grab that username/password and check out Lisa Rochon’s article.
The BMN is a great resource: a sly nudge around the system. So if you have usernames and passwords, please share. Consider it your contribution to the information commons. Hip hip huzzah!
-S.