This Wednesday (Jan 25), Pina Petricone launches what should be a fascinating new book.

The architect and University of Toronto professor leads one of the city’s and Canada’s best architecture offices – Giannone Petricone - who do creative and successful work from furniture up to whole blocks. With a sense of fun, no less.

Petricone edited this new book, a collection of essays that looks at concrete buildings as city-building blocks and as objects of beauty. She looks at the generation of Toronto concrete buildings from the 60s and 70s, and potential new works using new concrete technologies that offer incredible strength, plasticity and performance. I’ve seen some of the research and it’s fascinating.

Writers here include the illustrious George Baird, Charles Waldheim and Will Bruder.

This isn’t a “tour” of a completed building but of a proposal: an idea by the Toronto architects Wiliamson Chong to revive a former gravel pit north of Toronto as a hub of sustainable community development. It recently won a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence.

Sustainable, community, agriculture – these are all sexy terms (for architecture, I mean), but the depth of this proposal is just as compelling. Starting with a 440-acre site in Haliburton, Ontario, that has been ravaged by gravel extraction, it suggests a series of buildings that would hold greenhouses and a growing assortment of cultural activities related to food. There would be a library and visitor’s centre, gallery spaces, a test kitchen for workshops and culinary conferences, and more.

An interesting event today: the documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit is in town (Friday, Jan. 13) at TIFF Bell Lightbox to present his 2011 work Urbanized – a visually lovely piece of filmmaking that introduces audiences to various debates around urban planning and the future of cities.

I’d recommend seeing the film if you have any interest in urban affairs. It usefully looks at the big picture: the rapid urbanization of the world, which is already bringing incredible economic and environmental pressure on the biggest cities. He visits the slums of Mumbai, the townships of South Africa, the streets of Beijing, and on and on.

There’s an interesting panel discussion coming up on Thursday at U of T’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture. Titled Zoning Health, it puts Mirko Zardini, head of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, with U of T professor and architect Brigitte Shim. The very smart new dean of the school, Richard Sommer, moderates.

They’ll be building on the CCA’s current exhibition Imperfect Health, which I haven’t been to see but which sounds fascinating – touring through current healthcare buildings like Rem Koolhaas’s Maggie’s Centre Glasgow and various riffs on the language and lessons of health literal and otherwise.

Free tickets are here.

Hi, and happy 2012. Toronto’s housing market may slow down this year, but it’s been incredibly hot for a decade; still, developers haven’t done much to evolve the forms of housing in the city. There are still single-family houses (mostly in the suburbs), high-rise condos (everywhere), and not much in between. This big-and-small dichotomy is in keeping with the development history of Toronto; in the 1960s we went from building houses, almost exclusively, to building high-rise towers across the metro area. (And we’re now seeing how unwise that was.)

But other cities find a useful middle ground: walk-up apartment buildings. They are the fabric of most European cities and the best cities in North America. In Boston they take the form of three- and four-storey wood-framed buildings, with reasonably sized apartments. That’s where architect and academic Tim Love hails from; head of the architecture/planning office Utile, he’s teaching at U of T this year. And he may be helping to generate a new model for Toronto. A few weeks ago he and U of T  profs Ivan Saleff (work, PDF) and Robert Wright wrapped up their studio class on Walk-Up Urbanism. Their students came up with some brilliant and very practical designs for three- and four-storey buildings that would work on Toronto lots and would provide interesting and varied apartments, with decent outdoor space, all at a much lower cost than condos.

Hello, and welcome back to the blog.

I haven’t touched on the waterfront very often this year (I was busy elsewhere during the discussion of Doug Ford’s Wild Waterfront Kingdom), but a recent interview with Rem Koolhaas raises some interesting ideas about the waterfront and what he calls “assembly-line cities.”

Koolhaas, the most voluble and brilliant of star architects, recently spoke with the German newspaper Der Spiegel at its new offices on Hamburg’s waterfront. The building – home to Spiegel and its media conglomerate – is part of Hafen City, the single largest waterfront redevelopment in the West. Hafen City is similar in scope and style to what’s happening on Toronto’s waterfront: an industrial port land, much larger in Hamburg, is being converted to residential, office and commercial spaces with careful urban design and good architecture.

Recently I met with an American magazine editor who was in town for a conference, and she was shocked by what she saw. In New York, where she lives and works, the economy is sputtering. Stores sit empty in Midtown Manhattan. Nobody’s building. So the chaos of construction in downtown Toronto came as a big surprise.

Because she’s a smart editor, that insight turned into a story – which she asked me to write, for Architectural Record, about what’s bringing all those tall buildings and big design ideas to town.  I was surprised myself when I took stock of what’s going on here and what is coming: 150 more towers now under way. Norman Foster, KPMB and architectsAlliance building on the watefront. $5-million condos next to the Blinds To Go on Davenport. And on and on. (I didn’t even mention the suburban subway line that we are getting, or the Pan Am Games, or even CityPlace – which any city in North America would love to have right now, with all its faults.)

This is an amazingly positive story – especially when you contrast it to the very dark discussions we’re having here about governance, poverty, bubbly real estate, gridlock and infrastructure. (As in John Lorinc’s brilliant piece here.)

So how do we bring those narratives together?

Here’s a new feature I wrote for The Globe and Mail about the home of Steve Bugler  – a rare character in Toronto’s architecture and design scene. He produces incredible doors, windows and cabinetry for some of the city’s best buildings.

It’s the introduction for the architect, Mike Lafreniere of Setless Studio. He also has worked with some of Toronto’s best – Hariri Pontarini, Taylor Smyth – and this building is smart and beautifully detailed. Lafreniere is already working on some very impressive (and large) new houses but I hope to see more of his work around.

Hello. Here’s a catch-up on some writing I’ve done lately. I had two pieces published last week that I really enjoyed working on. First, I wrote about a reno of a midcentury house by Levitt Goodman architects for Designlines magazine. The architects and the owners did a fabulous job of updating, and only slightly expanding, a fine late-fifties house. The owners’ impeccable taste in art and design helps, too.

I also wrote about an unusual, and very good, new house by the architect Drew Hauser. It fills a 25-by-25-foot lot in the dense, mixed Corktown neighbourhood – and by building up vertically, it packs in a lot of beautifully complex interior space. See it here, and don’t miss the slideshow.

Also, backing up a couple of months, here’s an article I wrote about Toronto for the Italian design magazine Case da Abitare. It ran with amazing photos by Andrew Rowat, including that one above. The PDF is here; I’ll get around to posting the English text on alexbozikovic.com soon.

Recently the Zerofootprint Re-Skinning Awards announced this year’s winners – building projects that update older structures and improve their environmental performance, as well as their aesthetics, and set an example for how cities can be greened. It’s an interesting prize and it recognizes some very worthy projects that might otherwise go unnoticed.

For instance: the Centre for Justice Leadership at Humber College, by Gow Hastings Architects of Toronto. Located at the college’s Lakeshore campus in an older suburban neighbourhood, this 18,000-square-foot building is a former car dealership transformed into a facility for police and justice services programs.