Project and Miscellany

My Artistic Vision for Toronto Gothic

My initial vision for Toronto Gothic was simple: to develop technical drawings of the facades of Toronto’s Gothic Revival buildings, as my dad and I were both very fond of the buildings of this style at the University of Toronto. However, in order to achieve my goals for the project, I needed to take this further. My idea evolved to rendering the drawings in realistic detail in ink using artistic skills I had already developed from drawing from photographs. This was starting to get closer to the right idea, but it still wasn’t quite ambitious enough.

As I was learning the basics of technical drawing and architectural drafting, three key ideas started to take shape in my mind that ended up defining the full vision for Toronto Gothic.

First, I wondered whether the stylistic link between Gothic Revival and Medieval Gothic buildings went so far as proportioning using the same methods, which led me down a path of study on ancient methods of proportioning buildings geometrically, particularly in Gothic cathedrals. If these methods were indeed used, I thought I could use the building plans to reverse-engineer the geometric scheme of each building, and then use that scheme as the basis for drawing the facades.

Second, while I was practicing drawing in two-point perspective, I found a method in an old architectural drafting textbook for drawing the floor plan of a building in two-point perspective. Since I was collecting plans for the geometric studies mentioned above, the idea of drawing the buildings in perspective started to form as a way of adding complexity to the project. This led to the realization that, in theory, I could draw the buildings from any perspective without relying on reference photographs. This would also allow me to (a) draw the buildings from never-before-seen angles, and (b) isolate the buildings from their surroundings – eliminating anything that might distract from the building to showcase the architect’s design in the purest way possible (on paper).

Lastly, after drafting out a building in two-point perspective using this method, I realized that if I followed through on my plan to render it in realistic detail, it wouldn’t actually look realistic without shadows. This led me to studying the art and science of sciography – the geometric projection of shadows. While simple in theory sciography becomes exponentially more complex as shapes become more intricate. This was the final major conceptual piece of the puzzle. If I could pull it all off, I felt that the effect would be truly astonishing.

A note on the impact of the pandemic

The pandemic resulted in the Toronto Archives being closed for a long stretch of time between 2020 and 2022, and so this project has expanded to include some structures that are not Gothic Revival, like the front gate of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, or tangentially related to Gothic Revival, like the University College building at the University of Toronto (which is a combination of several styles, including Gothic Revival). I’ve been relying on building plans to make the renditions as accurate as possible, so I had to work with what I could find online during that time, or take suitable photos of myself. So it’s not strictly Gothic Revival anymore.