The Toronto style?
Toronto. Style. When describing the greater city’s architecture, can the two words be used together?
“If you really stop and look, Toronto is butt ugly,” says a blogger’s entry on a hot, unresolved, topic – does Toronto have its own style of architecture? – at the popular website Torontoist.com.
The city, the blogger ruthlessly writes, is “very squat, flat, bland, cheap buildings, sort of shabby.”
A similar perspective is offered by Toronto’s poet laureate, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco. A critic of Toronto because he loves it, he wrote in an email to Ideas about the metropolitan aesthetic: “It reflects the spirit of Toronto, doing things your own way without much mind to what will look good down the line.”
To the naked eye, the critiques ring true from Oshawa to Oakville. They apply to Queen St., with its appreciated but faded Victorian-era shop fronts; Finch Ave., low and undistinguished almost without end; the muffler-shop and gas-station sprawl of the suburbs – Dixie Rd. in Mississauga, Davis Dr. in Newmarket, or the relentlessly one-way King and Bond streets in Oshawa.
That’s a dominant view, but it is not the only one.
But to those who insist this city has no distinctive school of architecture – that it is ’squat, flat, bland, cheap’ – the Toronto Star presents these bold buildings from across the GTA as evidence to the contrary.