The street opened Friday.

Not a “total waste,” but otherwise this is correct. This building should have been much taller – there were superior earlier iterations, never really made public, that the city shot down – and it should’ve been finished years ago. Every time an ambitious international firm builds here, they...

Would it be too much to ask for front facades that have articulation, detail, good proportions, alignments, or any positive aesthetic qualities at all? It's hard to cheer for these plex developments when they look like this. The plans are wildly inefficient because of all the stairs, which is...

This looks like a DIY building on a backstreet of a second-tier city in Mexico.

MVVA on the landscape, continuing their campus work. This really does introduce a new scale to the heart of the campus. That is perhaps inevitable but… KCC is one place in Toronto where one should be especially delicate about scale and massing.

The lack of a new terminal is absolutely the fault of leadership. The new terminal would be maybe $150-million. The Parks 10-year capital budget is $4.3-billion. There is money. The island is the first or second most important park in the city and it should be treated accordingly.

That is not the argument at all. The real argument - which is based on a series of macroeconomic studies including one by Lindsay’s coauthor - is this: Airports boost economies through “network effects,” attracting corporate headquarters and agglomeration, all of which are stronger with one...

There is no evidence that YTZ is good for the economy. The airport’s claims of economic benefits are pure vibes, and their “report” from Richard Florida’s firm completely misstates the economic consensus about the role of airports. There’s a consensus among economists that one airport is better...

Why? Because the SLN simply has not had the concentration of people to support a lot street life and therefore businesses, If it did, the retail wouldn’t include a church and a half-dead pizza restaurant. There are a series of reasons for this. And it doesn’t mean it is a bad neighborhood. But...

@junctionist you may enjoy looking through this: https://www.newschoolexhibition.net/ The ones you mention are good buildings but there has always been a range of architectural expression.

This is beautiful and timeless. School buildings of any period have often been monochromatic. With the landscape in, it’s going to be the nicest building in the neighborhood.

In fact there are more like 300 townhouses, which occupy a significant area of the original plan, and there is also a lot of open space. One can argue numbers all day (I won't), but that place feels dead almost all of the time, except for school recess. It's an interesting lesson.

I was touring the area with the late George Baird and I made the same comment. I said, perhaps it’s not dense enough. His reply: “You have to remember, Alex, in those days ‘density’ was a dirty word.”

Exactly this. Plus: why is the retail all oriented toward the main streets, which will be traffic sewers? Retail streets that aren’t really, and pedestrian passageways that aren’t really. Cars everywhere and oceans of wasted space. Toronto city urban design in a nutshell.

And an explanation of this proposal:

My column on this (gift link): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/90421fe8336a64eba31e25ebdc75907f58944e66d4620d38c666cff8f6a94599/VEAXEBZFCRBMVGHJQLLOCDZGFI Key points about the size, which I and my colleague Jeff Gray have already shared on social media. It’s smaller: Second image is...

This is a bad decision. Instead of retaining the existing fire hall and making it part of the park – perhaps with a restaurant, as exists in more civilized places – it will now be demolished. That same park will now get twice as big, allowing people to walk down through some trees to reach the...

As much as we need new housing, this is bad news. It is locking in a vision for the area that makes no sense. The entire McCleary District plan is fatally flawed. Too many roads, massively overscaled roads, far too much open space, the nonsense PIC idea which will turn into self-storage or...