From The Globe, my piece Friday: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-port-lands-opens-don-river-biidaasige-park/ And a wonderful package by Vid Ingelevics and Ryan Walker...

My piece on the Spirit Garden: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-spirit-garden-at-nathan-phillips-square-brings-indigenous-presence-to/ Worth noting that the original square design and the 2007 redesign were each left incomplete..

It is interesting that, after an extraordinarily long pre-application consultation process, staff still deemed the application incomplete. And resolving that issue took six months. When we hear that development applications are now 80% faster, apparently there are exceptions.

Indeed it’s true that about 100 good Victorian and Edwardian buildings were demolished along Front Street East, mostly in the postwar era. The three most significant buildings here – the cathedral, St. Lawrence Hall, and St. Lawrence Market South – are extant. So is almost all of the housing...

Yes, in fact. This 2003 map from city planning gives a sense: everything yellow and orange is pre-1915, and red is 1915-1930. The narrative that Toronto lost many important buildings dates to the early 1970s. William Dendy’s Lost Toronto (1978) focuses on commercial and institutional buildings...

Toronto is probably the most intact prewar city in North America. Almost the entire fabric of the city built pre-1940 is still there. (Mostly houses.) Should we now save those tens of thousands of buildings forever? I don’t have a strong take on this project, but would the city really be better...

At least the park will be lively, because this massively overscaled road will be occupied by food trucks…

The existing buildings have a very strong vibe. The reclad will be some anodyne corporate nonsense. Just what one would expect from Oxford, unfortunately. Better than demolition!

This has gone from $6.2mm to $19.3mm. DTAH’s fee has gone from $725k to $1.383mm. For the nth time, the city hires a design team based mostly on them having the lowest fee.. and then the project expands like mad and their fee doubles. Both PUBLIC WORK and Claude Cormier’s office (when he was...

I met with Adam Vaughan: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ontario-place-pitchman-adam-vaughan/

Yes.

🤷‍♂️ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/90421fe8336a64eba31e25ebdc75907f58944e66d4620d38c666cff8f6a94599/ZYK2YSL5IZD63NB7SJ5J7TP6PM/

Some news! https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/90421fe8336a64eba31e25ebdc75907f58944e66d4620d38c666cff8f6a94599/XPLBI4ME3JDRFIDTM56LBLZTPA/

If you are (unwisely) aiming for minimalism, it can’t look like this

Thanks for the attention, folks. These are good questions you are asking.

The British second stair regulations put in place after Grenfell only apply to buildings above 18 m, and they have been criticized as overkill and/or irrelevant. It’s a nuanced discussion...