Search results

The Niagara Parks Commission is finally getting around to reusing its landmark historic power stations. The former Rankine Generating Station is being restored and turned into a museum and cultural attraction called the Niagara Parks Power Station. Photo by Robert Jones Recently, the Globe...

Now that the Eglinton LRT is nearing completion, is the city going to implement Eglinton Connects? There was so much talk about it 7 years ago and excitement. Then, there was some talk that conservatives on council didn't want to fund it. The street needs to be renovated throughout the area of...

I recently found an interesting article on Jerome Markson in Azure. Markson designed some remarkable buildings in the city's urban fabric, which are often hidden gems. His work spans the eras of modernism through to post-modernism. I think he did a great job with Market Square on the northeast...

Kris posted an interesting poster of a city initiative to enhance the city's employment lands in the Atria thread. I find it interesting because the city sometimes rejects condo development proposals to protect employment areas--often districts with a concentration of businesses or industrial...

When writing a reply to a thread, the auto-saved message flashes every 30 seconds near the reply box on the right side. Presumably, it's some feature to recover what you've typed as in Word. But it never recovers anything when I mistakenly close a tab, for instance. Does it work on UT?

When you think about, it's amazing that we still build these massive complexes at the water's edge. For decades we've heard complaints about how condos block the lake (like Harbour Square), yet here we are, filling the other half of our downtown waterfront with buildings at the water's edge...

The clutter in the public realm at University and College is ghastly. There's already a pole by the curb for the street light, yet there are those massive arms extending from another pole so that the traffic signals can be hung over the roadways. Topping it off is a third kind of pole inches...

In Toronto, the word "apartment" seems synonymous with renting a place to live. In terms of multi-unit residential buildings, if you want to rent you get an apartment, and if you want to own, you buy a condominium. A condo is based on a legal structure that necessitates a corporation with a...

Does anyone know of some existing brick-paved streets in Toronto? I'm confident that no stone-paved streets exist today, but that they did at some point. Toronto was already an established city before the dawn of the age of asphalt paving in the late 19th century. Toronto still has some...

I stumbled across an interesting blog dedicated to Toronto's Modern architecture. It's simply called Toronto Modern. The posts are not that frequent, but the motto seems to be quality over quantity as the posts are well-written and with good observations about subtle details. Unfortunately, it...

Les Whittington, Toronto Star, Ottawa Bureau Feb 25 2010 OTTAWA–Canada's wealth-sharing program is so out of whack that Ontario residents are helping to fund better government services in...

By Catherine Porter, Toronto Star Feb 25 2010 Down the path north into Christie Pits Park, you stumble upon a little gnome's house. It has wooden sides, a shingled, peaked roof, a little chimney and a window shuttered in black metal and locked tight with a padlock. It's a community bake...

I was looking through a collection of Moshe Safdie projects, and being naturally inclined to see his Toronto projects, I discovered this unbuilt postmodern project from 1989 which makes his evocative opera house proposal seem tame in comparison (because of the scope). Description below: (found...

The end might be coming for the lovely traditional "acorn" street light in Toronto. I'm hoping they could be retrofitted with LEDs rather than a switch to fluorescent. On the plus side though, the orange sodium vapour lights will inevitablely become a thing of the past. Against the...

Here's a thread for photos of interesting low-rise residential architecture in the city. I'll try to post houses of any style with some details on a regular basis, but I'm going for the truly outstanding. Everyone is free to contribute something new, of course, even if the photos aren't...

I found this interesting bit of information at the I Bike TO blog: It sounds like police are now paying some attention to the bad habits of cyclists. I just hope I won't get ticketed for not having a bell.

Liberty Village has some great projects and some cringe-worthy ones as well. The parking lots and strip mall result in messy urbanism, which is arguably holding back the historic neighbourhood. Liberty Village highlights poor planning Mar 08, 2008 04:30 AM Christopher Hume It is the best of...

The Star's Fixer column is looking for suggestions as to what to pressure politicians to fix about the declining cleanliness and overall appearance of the system. But with this sudden opportunity, what can we suggest? A new, tested signage standard? __ We're taking week-long look at the...

An interesting article from the Star brings an interesting inside look into a major contributor to smog and other pollution problems in the GTA. Check out the link too, as the page has some additionally interesting stats and media. ____ Dead Plant Walking For years, Canada's biggest...

Canada removes U.S., Israel from torture watchlist By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies, said on Saturday it would remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured...