By: Jack Landau, Urban Toronto The wheels are in motion for MOD Developments and Woodcliffe Properties’ much-anticipated adaptive reuse redevelopment of the heritage Waterworks Building at 505 Richmond Street West in Toronto. Designed by Diamond Schmitt Architects and featuring extensive preservation work planned by heritage specialists ERA Architects, the 13-storey project will consist of ten storeys of residential units atop a three-storey heritage base building […]

By: Craig White, Urban Toronto   Across Yonge Street from the Eaton Centre, one of Downtown Toronto’s most modern condo skyscrapers‚ The Massey Tower, is now rising. The slender 60-storey building from MOD Developments has an alternately curving or angular look, depending on the viewpoint you catch the building from. The design by Hariri Pontarini Architects puts undulating balconies on […]

By: John Lorinc, Globe and Mail   In a city that’s growing up, literally, the (typically) small matter of the apartment balcony has become – perhaps unsurprisingly – a polarizing obsession, and not just among those who live at the north end of an elevator ride home. An unscientific Facebook survey reveals the full gamut of […]

VIA URBAN TORONTO BY: JACK LANDAU   Striking architecture and a high-traffic location on Yonge Street just north of Queen are making MOD Developments Inc’s Massey Tower Condos one of the most frequently photographed construction projects on the UrbanToronto Forum. As the 60-storey, Hariri Pontarini-designed condominium tower continues to rise higher above the 1905-built Canadian Bank of Commerce building that […]

By: Alex Bozikovic Globe and Mail I thought it was too late for King-Spadina. The neighbourhood has been overrun by development over the past 20 years, adding nearly 20,000 people in increasingly tall high-rises. The city is exploring the billion-dollar Rail Deck Park just to create some open space. So where do you put the things […]

By: Jack Landau @ Urban Toronto Activity at the site of MOD Developments Inc‘s Massey Tower Condos has been progressing on Yonge Street north of Queen four roughly three years now. Work began with the June 2014 demolition of the rear portion of the 1905-built Canadian Bank of Commerce building at 197 Yonge Street, the preserved frontage of which […]

Toronto is blessed with more than its share of urban activists.

Roundabout the time David Miller was running for mayor in the early 2000s, a subculture of Toronto boosters began to sprout up, and they’ve been multiplying steadily ever since.

For them, Toronto is not perfect, but perfectible, and well worth perfecting. With their rise, the comparisons with other cities — typified by Peter Ustinov’s description of ours in 1987 as New York run by the Swiss — began to fade from public discourse, as Toronto was increasingly seen as sui generis, its own city, developing in its own way. And like any movement, it created its own crop of spokespeople.