The next big step for Toronto’s architecture and urban form is the proliferation of midrise buildings – five- to 10-storey buildings that can fit into the many gaps in the city’s streetscapes.

Like, for instance, a cold-storage warehouse next to houses, a railroad line, light industry and houses.

I really enjoyed writing about the new midrise building that will fill this site, Enigma Lofts, for The Globe and Mail.

[Architect Richard Witt] describes the building as “a kinked tower,” but in fact it’s more like three buildings: two L-shaped blocks, each four storeys tall, arranged to frame a courtyard, and a five-storey bridge across the middle from one to the other. The forces shaping those forms are many: rail lines, zoning rules, views and, yes, a fair bit of artistry.

I’ve had things to say about the role of midrise developments in the reshaping and intensification of downtown. This one seems like a remarkably good design for an odd and problematic place. It’s exciting.

Today, every good architect pays tribute to the idea of green building. This can mean high-tech systems (geothermal energy, which draws heat up from deep in the earth), or the green version of conspicuous consumption (solar panels). But sometimes it just means smart design, attentive to the movement of light and air, and modestly sized buildings. That’s true for this house by Dubbeldam Architecture + Design, which I just wrote about for Dwell.com. Dubbed Through House, it’s a 1,450-square-foot Victorian in the South Annex on a shallow lot.

Click through for more photos..

Two stories today in the Globe: this one is about a courtyard/backyard by Denegri Bessai.

 “The way these lots are used, from the mid-20th century on, is interesting,” says Mr. Bessai. “Rather than just a garden for sitting, or ornament, there are a lot of functions assigned to a small space. If you put it back with a few changes, it works well.”

I wrote this for the Globe about 62M, a dramatically shaped new condo in Winnipeg by 5468796.

(You may remember them for their Bloc_10.)

It’ll be a provocative and memorable building.

Enjoy.

Last week in The Globe and Mail I wrote about a renovation by Superkul Architect that’s notable for what it doesn’t do. In a neighbourhood of great wealth and an incredible landscape – this is the land of deep ravines and new chateaux -  the architects and their clients worked with their old, totally undistinguished house and built on its character. Thanks to Superkul’s Andre D’Elia for the interview.

At one and a half storeys, with a hipped roof, bland finishes and an odd, cut-up floor plan, this house was a generic builder’s house with historical pretensions and no historic value. “The hipped roof didn’t scare us,” says Mr. D’Elia. “We asked, ‘How can we take advantage of all this?’” Indeed, Mr. D’Elia and his partner Meg Graham have learned about the pleasures of working with the constraints of renovation. “Sometimes you get quirky spaces,” he says, “and they’re spaces you wouldn’t deliberately design. But you work with them and you can give them an interesting twist.”

More pictures after the jump.

Back in the late 1990s, when the current boom of condo construction began in Toronto, almost every building had “traditional” features. That word was used loosely, since it’s hard to classify awkward 15-storey buildings with concrete structure, stucco cladding and aluminum windows in any particular tradition. But you know the style or styles: the fake quoins, the fake mansard roofs, the fake French balconies, the fake limestone and fake-aged concrete paving stones.

They are ridiculous: Frankenstein collages of pre-20th-century styles and forms onto 20th-century building technology. They look bad and they will age badly, just as the postmodernist pastiches of the 1980s are doing right now.

I thought that, in downtown Toronto, we were done with all this. The condo market now seems to demand modernist design – which even if it is derivative is, at least, harking back to the high modernist skyscrapers of the 1960s. When it is bad – and it is almost always cheaply built and poorly detailed -  at least it’s not as bad as the worst buildings of 1987 and 1997.

But I was wrong. History repeats itself.

Here’s a story in The Globe and Mail that I wrote about a contemporary house in Canada’s most important modernist district, Don Mills. Architect Cheryl Atkinson did a very nice job of designing a two-storey, U-shaped house that takes full advantage of the neighbourhood’s generous greenbelt.

For the March issue of Dwell, wrote this story about a spectacular apartment in one of the great modernist apartment buildings: Montreal’s Habitat 67, by Moshe Safdie. The story is essentially about the interior, which belongs to Byron Peart and Stefan Weisgarber – two fashion professionals who are collectively obsessed with Expo 67, contemporary furniture design, Mies and the Bauhaus. It is gorgeous. And the building, as I discovered last summer, is holding up beautifully.

And in the next issue: Blantyre House, by Toronto favourites Williamson Chong Architects. Or, specifically, the kitchen, which is entirely wrapped in a cladding of rift-cut white oak. It’s a rigorously detailed room that seems to make the owners very happy.

In today’s Globe is my story about Notan House by Atelier Kastelic Buffey. This is a spectacular example of a house that strives for, and achieves, a spare beauty. They’ve named it Notan House, adopting a Japanese term for the juxtaposition of light and dark.

It’s a big weekend in Toronto for architecture and design.If you’re visiting, welcome. May I suggest my introduction to Toronto for Architectural Digest?

The arty end of the design world shows off at the Gladstone Hotel’s Come Up To My Room, which features installation and conceptual works, and the Toronto Design Offsite event in the Junction. I’m excited about both.

But the big event is the Interior Design Show, this weekend featuring two architecture firms I’ve covered here: Dubbeldam Architecture + Design and BlackLAB.

Heather Dubbeldam’s firm  is one of Toronto’s and Canada’s best emerging firms. Working on houses and interiors in Toronto, they’ve been building a body of consistently excellent projects. I’ve covered their work, and admired it, for years – including on the blog here and here.  Last summer I wrote for The Globe and Mail’s Style Advisor about “White House,” one of their recent projects (story PDF here).