So many beautiful mature trees in that park - one of my favourites, in the whole city, is the huge white oak just to the north-west of Eddie.

Yes - don't know where it ended up. There's a mini version in St. James' Park.

I think it works very well with the sequence of buildings along that stretch of Yorkville. Janet Rosenberg's formal garden - a modern reinterpretation of the traditional patterning of the French parterre - links 18 Yorkville with the Classically-inspired Library, and the outrageous red fountain...

I think it strikes the perfect note of high camp.

The 25 ft. cast iron Allan Gardens Fountain, once the largest in Ontario: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Horticultural_Gardens_Toronto.jpg

Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding Portrait would be closer to the mark, even though the wife isn't preggers. http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/Images/ARTH_214images/van_eyck/arnolfini/painting.jpg

Ain't that the truth.

So do I - art transcends time, and cultures, and in some respects too much "book learning" and the prejudices of "good taste" get in the way of appreciation - the point I made earlier, about how newly-rediscovered Greek architecture was thought ugly by refined, mid-18th century Palladians, being...

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. 'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over...

Not sure when it was built, but perhaps it is a more appropriate form than an obelisk, for Canadians? After the first Brock Monument was blown up, in 1840, Thomas Young's design for a replacement was an obelisk - and partly for that reason rejected for William Thomas's design, which was more in...

I agree - we've moved on from the apologetic '80s and '90s when balconies were tucked inside the building and turned into solariums as if they were something shameful. Now they're out of the closet big time, and part of the rather fun re-ordering of things that's going on.

We need a baby bump profile shot for a better comparison.

Great to see the "past" being re-imagined in such a fun way.

If that's all we're getting, they could quite easily have left those beautiful mulberry bushes alone.

Jolly hockey sticks!

Another hideous Husky Boy bites the dust. Cry me a river.

Surely the solution to that problem would be for the owners of condos all over town to elect a kinder, gentler breed of gauleiter to their respective boards, to make wiser decisions on their behalf? Then, they can enjoy similar rights of self-expression to property owners who live in little houses.

Again, I'd have to disagree with Diamond on some of this. The street grid is relentless and predictable, and we carry it with us in our minds as an easy wayfinding device ( to get to any given point, we know we must go in a straight line in this direction, then turn at 90 degrees and go in that...

pman: I'd also take issue with Diamond's definition of Lake Ontario as our greatest geographical asset. While we're a city by a lake, and obviously the point at which the city meets the lake ( the evolving waterfront promenade ) is a defining space, other Great Lakes cities also face out onto...

Thanks for the link to Jack Diamond's thoughts on beauty, pman. I agree with him that the robust building boom of the late Victorian and Edwardian era, defined by a confusion of competing revivalist styles, wasn't exactly a golden age of architectural elegance and that, as a consequence, we're...