From 9 June to 20 November 2005 in the Octagonal Gallery, the Canadian Centre for Architecture announces the opening of the exhibition Super City, an installation by Douglas Coupland, perhaps best known as the author of the groundbreaking Generation X. Taking up themes explored in previous exhibitions based on the CCA's extensive collection of toys, Coupland has devised a personal reflection on the power of building toys to shape children's perceptions of the built world—and thus to influence the artifacts they produce as adults.

Illustrating his theory that building toys have the power to feed themselves back into the real world of objects and ideas, Coupland’s Super City installation invokes an imaginary urbanscape by deftly combining scale-models of high-rise buildings, monuments, and infrastructural elements with an assortment of parts from the various building kits in his personal collection. Toronto 's monumental CN Tower (1976), segments of the U.S. interstate highway system, and typical American water towers, and most infamously, the World Trade Center towers by Yamasaki (1966–77) destroyed on 11 September 2001, are all integrated with parts from the Super City, Tinkertoy, Jumbo Lego, Meccano, Tog'L, and Matador kits. Occupying a space 12' x 12' x 12', the assemblage of shapes and objects is uniformly painted white, echoing Coupland's recollection that as a child, he perceived "everything in the Lego universe as perfect and crisp and anti-death.... Lego was the future. White. Clean. Plastic."

Admittedly a "Legoholic" by the time he went to Kindergarten in 1966, Coupland remained devoted to Lego above all his other building toys until the mid-1970s. When the more sophisticated, "modernist" toy building kit Super City was launched in 1967, he immediately recognized its unique qualities: "Anything made from Super City looked like a Craig Elwood or a Neutra or a Wallace K. Harrison." Produced by Ideal Toys for a very brief period, Super City was for Coupland "the best building kit ever made—possibly even better than Lego." Lamentably, it was "too sophisticated for young hands to work with," and the company phased it out by 1968.

Among the many toy building kits Coupland played with as a child and collected into his adult life, Lego and Super City in particular captured his imagination, their modular and binary nature finely sharpening his sense of the way the world is structured and perceived. As the two building kits tuned Coupland's sensibilities to the concept of interchangeable parts and integrated systems, he was mysteriously drawn to analogous phenomena — not only architecture and urban infrastructure, but also things as diverse as disaster movies of the 1970s and ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arranging) — and the dynamics of assembly and disassembly in a real world where creation is haunted by its opposite, destruction.

With the advent of mass-produced kits of plastic parts epitomized by Super City, the flexibility of modular elements eclipsed the miniaturization of whole buildings and objects typical of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century toys. By their very nature, modular toys invoked the binary systems and digital technologies that have become ingrained in modern life, and per force "format" much of our contemporary experience. Ambiguous in form, these ubiquitous toys produced probable objects that suggested improbable worlds, and from the 1960s led to an increasing interest in "possible future cities" redolent of a dizzying array of disparate elements. For Coupland, toy building kits exercised their capacity to "mold the world we are making, the way we read the world made around us, and the way we imagine worlds that might be.”

Since 1990, when Norman Brosterman's remarkable collection of building toys was acquired by the CCA, a series of exhibitions and small books have explored a wide range of topics, from the curious history of child's play to the educational merits of construction toys, toys that fueled the modernist tradition and toys that suggest "potential architecture" in the real world—everything from "dream houses" to "toy towns." Douglas Coupland's Super City installation at the CCA continues this tradition, inviting visitors to speculate on how these toys have affected the way they experience and interact with the world.

Douglas Coupland has written nine novels—including Generation X, Microserfs, and Hey Nostradamus! — that explore contemporary culture and plot the effects of technology and globalism on the human soul. He has also authored non-fiction works on Canada and Canadian identity, and has written and performed a provocative play inspired by the tragic destruction of New York's twin towers, "September 10, 2001" produced for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-on-Avon, England. Since 2000, Coupland has been engaged with the production of art works and installations that transgress conventional boundaries. His "room environments," in which relationships of scale are effectively distorted, act as gateways into uncharted terrain where retail and pop culture collide with art, design, architecture to elicit novel forms.