Rooftopping Toronto: Making It To The Top With Verve

It being a public holiday on the day of our visit, we didn't expect to find the ground floor crawling with workers. Added to this was our initial inability to find a stairwell. The general philosophy of my photography partner has always been that "it's not what you wear, but how you wear it", and in this vein we decided to (confidently) walk straight up to a metal-worker, and ask for directions up...

Perhaps the most noteworthy stylistic flourish on this otherwise generic condo is the large boat hull-esque structure protruding from part of the uppermost roof (the edge of which makes a great lookout point)...

Dwarfing all of the surrounding buildings, this fly-on-the-wall perspective of St. James Town and the surrounding area made me feel as if I were in Koyaanisqatsi...

The wind died down, finally, and the whole low-lying world came alive. The wallpaper of boring city structure began to make sense; adapting the aforementioned worldview, it became apparent that it is not where you live, but how you live in it. Even though soon-to-be new, the allotments in this building still seem to me to be oppressing living conditions.

Living in a 'box' isn't so bad if you live like Snoopy - perennially on the roof...

For me, at least, these places will always be stepping stones - tests of endurance, means to clarity, modes of a 'better view'. If the way in which we live is not a sustainable one (as the term is so commonly thrown about), then we still live under a veil. To peek beyond the sheet, to make light of the harsh reality or urban living and find joy, even in the built environment's necessary brutalism, is then to relieve oneself of the burden of urbanism, even if for one chilly afternoon, up on a rooftop.