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Say what you want about their "authoritarianism" but if that were to be envisioned here: a) It would be a heavily scaled-down and cheapened design, and far less ambitious in scope and function from what was originally conceptualized. b) It would probably take upwards of 15 years of...

Our culture has become so cynical and sclerotic in the aftermath of COVID that I'm not even confident that Toronto could do what we were able to do ourselves 10 or 15 years ago (e.g., Bloor Street/Mink Mile and Queen's Quay).

At some point, our city (and country) stopped realizing that, uh...this isn't the postwar era anymore and our job is to move beyond the year 1989. How long have these "pilots" and "studies" on "proposals" to "maybe" revitalize a small section of a street or two been going on? Perhaps triple the...

I'm going to say something extremely provocative, but the glacial pace at which we (don't) move things forward in the Anglosphere West would seriously appall East and Southeast Asians, and perhaps Gulf Arabs as well. They progress by decades in the span of a few years; we progress by a few years...

New renderings from Metrolinx:

Ah...here we are in 2025, well past the heyday of the "woke" zeitgeist, and we're still marginalizing brutally honest observations about a civilization's trajectory as "far right"? We live in an era where we need to start realizing that virtue-signalling about how "democratic" we are and how...

It's easy enough to put forth the proposition of "if only we invited the likes of Zaha Hadid" on paper, but at a more fundamental level, we need to ask ourselves: is this a city and country that (still) believes enough in itself and the future to exercise such daring? Toronto, Canada, North...

For the longest time, Toronto was a parsimonious Presbyterian industrial blue-collar backwater. Our development into a prominent metropolis is extremely recent, and it will take decades for the mindset to shift within our populace and establishment.

I'll acknowledge that this one is certainly out of the ordinary with its sculptural forms, but I can't say it's a total success. Curved glass alongside spandrel is a weird combination of cheapness and refinement.

This was a nation that stitched itself together coast-to-coast with a transcontinental railway in the late 19th century, and yet here we are in a far more advanced and enlightened age, doubting our ability to built its modern technological equivalent across a much shorter span. I'm not saying...

Yes, we did build great things in the past, when our nation was young(er) and the broader Western world was not yet in decadent cultural/moral decline. Somewhere along the way, the Canadian cultural character lost its propensity to dare and dream big once our establishment was handed over from...

Tomorrow, not today. And as a patriotic Canadian, let me extrapolate on that and put forth the proposition that the country as a whole could very well become a great power in the coming centuries, as counterintuitive and improbable as that may sound. We in this city and nation all need to stop...

We've been in this spandrel phase for what...20ish years now and counting? Toronto's developers and architects need to start realizing that they ought to be building one of the world's great metropolises of tomorrow, not a giant Nowheresville.

Bottom-of-the-barrel suburban-industrial design entirely unworthy of a future transit hub of the leading city of a first-world G20 nation. When will our civic establishment rise to the occasion?

From my Yorkville walk earlier today:

G+C must be banished from Toronto and the GTA for good. Let them go out of business in a metropolis that (in my view) is slowly but surely starting to turn the corner on aesthetic standards for the past few years.

Glorified trash cans. 2020s spandrel with its abundance of janky gridlines is far more egregious than 2000s spandrel in the sense that now we have entire expanses of wall pretending to be window.

One minor quibble about this otherwise excellent development: the thin stripes of spandrel (not nearly as offensive as what's found in typical Toronto condo construction, granted) do detract somewhat from the vertical sleekness of the red fins. The spaces in between fins should either have been...

How worried should we realistically be, given this is HPA?

As I scrolled through Twitter/X, the videos coming out of an entire block of trees being clear-cut overnight in an undercover, mafia-like fashion made my blood boil. Straight out of the last century. How unbecoming of 2024, an era in which we should be well past this crude postwar mindset of...