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Book Design City Toronto

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It’s smoggy. You maybe want to percolate your body in the outdoors, with lemonade and asthma inhalers and beer. Or you maybe want to celebrate contemporary Toronto architecture — with its attendant celebration/experience of air conditioning and climate control and wine in plastic cups.

Well, if the latter’s what you’re after then tonight there’s a serendipitous event on the sched. It’s the launch of Design City Toronto, a glossy new coffee table tome highlighting designs of many newish “Renaissance T-dotto” buildings. Interestingly, some of the buildings included aren’t even completed yet. Ask them about that if you go, and also whether they will ever make a book like this that is a little easier to carry in one’s pocket, maybe.

The event is part of the Festival of Architecture and Design and Doors Open Toronto. Archi-heavies Bruce Kuwabara and Jack Diamond, and many others, will also be in attendance.

Design City Toronto Launch
7pm to 9:30pm (doors 6:30pm)
Design Exchange, 234 Bay
Free

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5 comments

  1. Will Alsop (OCAD architect with Rod Robbie) is having an art show in a couple of weeks.

    What is remarkable about that project on the cover was the process of working with the neighbourhood – which led to an extra-ordinary result. Often, people look at the end without thinking about how it got there.

    Meanwhile, the Gehry thing that looms over Grange Park, has managed to make historic Grange House disappear.

  2. Got it from the library and was it ever boring!

  3. More than merely boring, sycophantic. Also, as an exercise, count the number of buildings that are described, sometimes more than once, as “unassuming.”

  4. Design City? We have a long way to go to fix the bad urban design and mediocre architecture of this city. I agree with Mark Kingwell’s comments about Toronto:

    “Parts of downtown are good, especially the area around the TD Centre and the Santiago Calatrava intervention in BCE Place. But there is a vast amount of what Rem Koolhaas calls ‘junkspace’ in Toronto. Too much context, not enough monument. Low-rise nothingness. We’ve allowed a potentially beautiful city to become plain at the centre and positively ugly at the periphery.” —Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto

    “Toronto is not nearly as beautiful as it should be, given the wealth and cultural muscle that is everywhere. I’ve always found it hard to square, especially when driving in from the airport after being somewhere else: the streets all look so shabby. In a way, it’s perversely charming, like the really cool and smart kid who dresses like a dork. I wouldn’t want to lose all the grittiness, but really, this ought to be a much more spectacular place.” —Mark Kingwell, Professor of Philosophy, U of T, author, social critic