Two weeks ago I took my son to Canada’s Sugar Beach. He’s a toddler, and I wasn’t sure whether he’d enjoy the visit. The newest park on the waterfront is a playful two acres of landscape design by Claude Cormier, with candy-striped hunks of granite and small, sugar-pile hills of grass – but that conceptual play is a bit over the head of a 19-month-old. I liked it a lot, and surprisingly, so did he: those rocks and hills are great to climb and tumble on, and the large artificial beach, with its wispy white sand imported from Ohio, is one serious sandbox. Throw in the sights of the lake (boat! seagull!) and you have a winning park experience for almost anybody.

Welcome, Spacing readers. This is my blog about architecture in Toronto and beyond. Please take a look around; click here for a post on the best new buildings in Toronto this year; or click here for details about me.

This is a building that works.

Yes, it looks sexy and impractical: a cascading Jenga stack of glass, cement board and steel, punctured by bright shots of colour, hanging gardens and an atrium, heavy blocks of apartments hanging in the air.

But this new co-op residence by Teeple Architects has substance, too. It has the gutsy but practical spirit of Toronto’s best architecture: It’s green, hardy, and very inexpensive, and provides 85 large and comfortable apartments for Toronto Community Housing tenants.

Head into the office tower at Bloor and Bay, wind your way past Gap Kids and down into the concourse, open a heavy door labelled WORKShop and you will see this: a plywood desk by Frank Gehry. A 1960s fireman’s helmet from Hong Kong. An art installation that arranges cheap melamine bowls into a symbolic emperor’s gate. And, all around you, an installation of colourful glass vials dispensing luscious odours of pine.

This - the vials, not the other stuff – is Scentscapes, a new show at the one-of-a-kind gallery Workshop. ”Scent Squadron,” an installation by Toronto architects Khoury Levit Fong, plays with the ideas of the traditional Chinese garden. It builds on a design for a public garden now being constructed in Xi’an, China (by a team led by Rodolphe El-Khoury). Both are intriguing projects: they appeal to the fifth of our five senses, using smell in a deliberate and cleverly abstract way.

The Globe and Mail has the news that the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture is considering a new plan to revitalize its facilities – by moving into a new “visual arts, architecture and urbanism complex” in One Spadina Crescent.

The faculty held a competition, won by Office dA with Adamson Associates, to revamp its current facilities. As I wrote a little while back, it won a Progressive Architecture award, but seemed to me like a heavy-handed approach to a building that has lots of soul.

Now that proposal seems likely to die.The new idea(news of which has been circulating for a while) would give a new purpose to One Spadina, an ornate pile that since 1875 has been a seminary, a military hospital (where Amelia Earhart worked as a nurse) and home to the university-owned Connaught Medical Research Labs (the developers of insulin).

On a recent trip to Ottawa, I had a chance to visit the Canadian Museum of Nature. This natural history museum just completed an epic $230-million renovation led by KPMB – and along with much unsexy restoration and repair to the structure’s guts, and a new facilities and event space, it fused a glassy new form onto the vaguely Gothic museum. The two parts make a handsome couple.

If you want it done right, do it yourself. The gutsy young architects who run Studio Junction, Peter Tan and Christine Ho Ping Kong, would be too modest to put it that way – but they’ve accomplished some extraordinary work by building their own designs, with Tan sawing, milling and finishing the fine-grained details.

Case in point: Mjolk, a design shop in Toronto’s Junction area.

I’m off blog duty this week and out of town this weekend. Let me leave you with a recent article I wrote for Designlines Magazine: a visit to the Riverdale House, by the talented interior designer Mazen El-Abdallah.

Next week, I’ll tour a new shop whose interior is inspired by the best of Scandinavian Modern and Japanese design – and does something creative with those two legacies.

That Designlines piece is here.

The city of Toronto has announced the winners of a competition for a new building at St. Lawrence Market: Richard Rogers’s firm and Adamson Associates.

As I wrote last month, this is the best of the shortlisted designs and a brilliant solution to a difficult puzzle. The 118,000-square-foot building will combine an open market space with a secure courthouse and office space – while maintaining an ensemble of 19th-century public buildings that were Toronto’s first civic centre. (A Google map is here.)

For me, the highlight of this weekend’s Doors Open Toronto festival was the official opening of the green roof at City Hall.

South view from the green roof

It’s only the first stage in a larger renovation of City Hall and Nathan Philips Square (see here for my take and background information). But already, the designers have created one of the city’s most remarkable public spaces: 35,000 square feet of garden, planted within the concrete, sandstone and glass of downtown.

Today (May 28) will mark the groundbreaking on two buildings of exceptional importance for the city: a religious and community centre for Ismaili Muslims and a new museum of Islamic art. They’re being driven by the Aga Khan, the Ismaili spiritual leader and one of the world’s great architecture patrons (this book gives background). He’s in town today for the ceremony.

You may not have heard much about it before today, because the Aga Khan’s agencies are volunteer-driven and seemingly too modest to do much PR. Too bad, because this project is something special: essentially, a religious community is giving Toronto a major art museum and a new park, all designed to very high standards. (Globe news story; Lisa Rochon; Star news story.)

The centre and museum are large – about 100,000 square feet each – and the designs show creative, contemporary architecture that’s inflected with Islamic symbolism.