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I agree with much of the above, but disagree that Chicago's "luck" stems from being older. Chicago, for whatever combination of factors, did enter into a new spirit of architecture and design on a radical level that no other North American city (with the possible exceptions of Boston and LA)...

We already have something somewhat like that. It's called the Gardiner Expressway. In any case, unwieldy as the El may be, the pictures of it do carry a sense of urban frisson that is quite stirring, even to a confirmed realist such as myself. The top picture is a stunning array of...

Bit of an apples and oranges argument - Chicago is simply not shaped like Toronto and its development is far more linear; the river on the west side was the location of an industrial belt that made other uses unattractive. One thing Chicago has that Toronto lacks in terms of a building type...

That is balderdash. The imperial UK ruled over two fifths of the land surface of the planet. The US are pikers in comparison and Canada is a flea on a piker.

I should have clarified - "beauty" to me is something I am largely indifferent to. I appreciate where and when I can but I prefer rationality, dignity, elegance, order, utility, convenience - or "openess," if you like - of use. The most beautiful palace in the world is of no use if it houses a...

I would not call London beautiful. It has some absolutely fascinating buildings and tremendous cultural resources but is really a desperately ugly place. St. Petersburg, Venice, Amsterdam, historic Boston and certain of its suburbs are coherent to the extent that beauty could be applied as...

You won't hear one from me. New York is not beautiful, but its ugliness (if that's the word) is very different from the scruffiness of Toronto. Perhaps the best way to define it is that New York, if often full of grand buildings and public spaces, has an oppressive, sinister quality that has...

Downtown Houston is grossly underrated, if you like mid-century modern, that is. It is essentially the Miesian ideal - the city so elegant it is not even there.

Basing one's criteria on whether or not some ostensible girlfriend would enjoy a 45 minute walk through the center of town seems like an odd way to quantify beauty. You might omit places such as Naples, Italy and St. Petersburg, Russia on that basis due to crime, pollution, garbage and...

I have been thinking about the original question and I have to say that the answer is no. The follow-up question might be asked: is beauty a necessary component of urban reality in our time? The answer to this might also be no if we think we can see a new form of urban synthesis emerging in...

And I reiterate that the older buildings in that picture are nothing special whatsoever, are certainly not unique to Toronto - are in fact, a dime a dozen throughout the continent - and that the newer buildings, while elegant, do not scream "Toronto" the way that, say, almost any 1970s apartment...

Your first photo shows some mediocre older buildings offset by modernist high rise architecture and landscaping. It is a pleasant but undistinguished scene that is certainly not particular to Toronto.

To say nothing of Chicago. But all three lag behind New York in terms of high-rise residential.

Boston, Denver, Seattle, Portland (OR), Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, and to a lesser extent Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Minneapolis all mix modernist architecture with renovated historic buildings to differing degrees of success. New York is somewhat less like this...

I fail to see how a similar scene is not fairly common in North American cities from coast to coast.

Leaving aside my own opinion that New York is in fact not beautiful, the two cities do not resemble one another past a few blocks of Park Avenue corresponding roughly to King and Bay and a miniscule number of interior spaces.

That article gave me the vapours. Po-faced horn-honking about how we're actually very talented but oh, so humble, and let us humbly tell you the fact that our talent for being humble is why we humbly aren't seen to be as talented as we talentedly humble are. Plus assertions like this: "We...

I believe the area I was in was German Village, which struck me as a very civilized and small-scale environment for all that downtown was blocks away. I see your point about the expressways although I wonder if cutting off German Village from downtown did not perhaps prevent its obliteration...

There are plenty of Victorian suburbs and urban neighborhoods in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Richmond and Louisville, KY. The city that actually has a very Toronto feel to its older residential architecture is Columbus, OH, which has preserved a large amount of homes directly adjacent to...

I don't see anything wrong in using existing models, whether from antiquity or recent periods, to incorporate strong design elements in new projects. Piazza San Marco was the basis for a major public space in New Orleans; a descendent of the Pyramids shows up in front of the Louvre in Paris...