THE GOLDEN SPIKE: Urbanism and the End of the Holocene Exhibition Opening
Works by Kearon Roy Taylor, Design Research and Teaching Fellow at the School of Architecture

The way we build cities has remade the world around us.

In 2023, Lake Crawford in Ontario was proposed as marker – THE GOLDEN SPIKE – of a new geological epoch: the index of our practices of urbanism rendered as geological difference by way of its unique stratification.

The exhibition explores a collection of narratives surrounding the Lake, and its role as witness to both contemporary urban transformations and its longer Indigenous history.

A stone’s throw away from the rapidly-developing urban edge of the Greater Toronto Area, the Lake Crawford reveals in stark relief the possibility of land beyond commodity: as agent and teacher in a rapidly-changing world.