Mistakes by the Lake: Making and Unmaking Space at the Canadian National Exhibition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the Canadian National Exhibition and its site, Exhibition Place in Toronto, to explore the changing constellation of meanings surrounding public architecture over the past century. It reveals the cultural, financial, spatial and emotional dimensions of the built environment. It argues that public structures carry deep-rooted, variegated societal implications, which can be recovered by examining their “lives” and the furor sometimes surrounding their “deaths.” Landmarks are invaluable pieces of civic machinery; they are storehouses of memory and focuses of ritual, and through them we can learn a great deal about the concerns and values of Canadians in the past. As a city-owned site, Exhibition Place offers a uniquely abundant array of archival and newspaper sources for such an intervention. From the 1900s, when the CNE remade itself in the image of Chicago's White City fairground, to the post-war era when it became Toronto's proving ground for modern architecture, to the present day when the trend is to destroy rather than to create functional public spaces, the city's waterfront has experienced far more change than continuity. Each generation has interpreted their forebears' legacies in a different light, and found new ways to adapt, corrupt, or misuse them. Financial concerns have transformed Exhibition Place from a working site of memory to a nearly featureless, antiseptic trade show complex. Few Torontonians have appreciated the value of their old buildings, a situation worsened by the CNE's invisibility during the fifty weeks each year during which it does not operate. This has made any attempt at historical preservation an extremely fraught affair. By studying the evolution and devolution of public architecture, then, we are also studying the evolution and devolution of our senses of self.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".