Hi. More tomorrow (Jan. 25) about the Interior Design Show and other events. But I have a story today in The Globe and Mail about a project that shows some good design and equally strong community spirit.

It’s the home of my neighbours Aaron Letki and Angela Tsementzis (who is in the photo above). Letki, a talented young architect, grew up in our area – near Christie Pits Park – and when he moved back in, he brought a sense of community. He renovated a beat-up convenience store, added a storey on top to create a duplex for himself, and fought for the right to open a café here, and The Hub is a comfortable meeting place for neighbours of all stripes.

It’s an interesting case for how to redevelop this building type.

Terrible news in Regent Park last weekend: the killing of a teenager.

Fifteen-year-old Tyson Bailey was shot dead inside 605 Whiteside Place, on the top floor. Paramedics had to take the stairs because the elevators were not running; according to news reports it is unclear why they were not running, or whether this had an impact on efforts to save his life. Landlords Toronto Community Housing say the elevators were not broken.

However, in a broad sense this event fits an architectural cliche. 605 Whiteside is one of the highrise buildings of Regent Park South, designed by the modernist architect Peter Dickinson in 1958, with two-level “maisonette” apartments.

What did the building have to do with Tyson Bailey’s death?

There is an obvious answer, which may or may not be right.

I was deeply saddened to learn this week that Ada Louise Huxtable had passed away. For those of us who write about buildings, she was a titan: a historical figure who basically invented the profession of architecture critic 50 years ago, and was still doing it, very well, this winter.

Nothing I’ve written on No Mean City would be possible without her. Nothing in Spacing would be possible without her.

Here is the New York Times’s obit. It was at the Times that she – “a young, brash, believing woman”   with an architectural-history degree – became an unlikely power player in the world of development and planning.

She defined how to write about these subjects for a general audience, bridging the scholarly and the concrete, highbrow and slangy. She understood construction and finance, zoning and traffic, the history of architecture  and the realities of marketing. She made architecture part of serious conversation.

She knew that buildings are made out of money, power and politics, and she was also a staunch defender of the public good: grand public buildings, diverse and lively streets, parks that are pleasant to be in, private spaces that serve their users comfortably. Her contemporary Jane Jacobs thought about the big picture; she thought about the big picture and also the details. In retrospect, she was right about everything.

What did we learn about building cities in 2012? From Superstorm Sandy, the lesson was that cities are not immune from the forces of nature. Wind and water trump steel and stone.

It was also, as the most powerful storm to hit New York in its 400-year history, a hell of a marketing event for climate change. This is not only a moral problem for the long term but also a practical challenge: where and how should we build our cities?

The wiser heads in landscape architecture are ahead of the rest of us – and their foresight produced real payoffs in New York. New redevelopment projects on the small Governor’s Island survived the storm, because landscape architects Adriaan Geuze and West 8 raised parts of the landscape 16 feet. (“I’m glad I hired a Dutchman,” says the island’s chief.) And on hard-hit Staten Island, some neighbourhoods were protected by the earthworks of Fresh Kills Park – a garbage dump that is being remade into a park by James Corner Field Operations.

Those two projects reflect the growing ambition of landscape architecture, Both those firms are working in Toronto right now, too.

And one of the biggest Toronto design stories of the decade will be the opening, in 2013, of Don River Park – which is built on and around a landform that will protect downtown Toronto from flooding.

In the Globe today I have a feature about a house renovation by PLANT Architect. This one is unusual, within the world of architectural journalism, because it only goes halfway; the owners and architects left this Edwardian house largely intact, with all its woodwork and plaster, and then added on a new seciton that is totally contemporary.

Architects and urban designers, have a look at this: The Green Line, a new urban design competition for a leftover site in Toronto.  Specifically it’s a five-kilometre hydro corridor, the area under a set of electricity transmission lines, on the edge of downtown Toronto.

A few locals have compared this to New York’s High Line, which began as a spectacular piece of infrastructure and ended up as a spectacular (and expensive) park. In fact the Green Line, which is an ideas-only competition, does not propose anything so grand; it’s more in keeping with the tactical urbanism that has taken root in American cities, from San Francisco to Detroit, during this economic downturn.

I recently attended a lecture by the Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa, who’s part of the Pritzker-Prize-winning duo SANAA. It was part of the Daniels Faculty’s Bulthaup Lecture Series, which you must know about if you’re in Toronto and interested in contemporary architecture. Next up: Manuel Aires Mateus, Jan. 15.

Anyway: Nishizawa mentioned a fascinating new project, a satellite for the Louvre in the town of Lens. SANAA’s design arranged the artworks and artifacts on display in one, long, continuous hall, with contemporaneous pieces arranged next to each other (and works with thematic links arranged in front of each other). It makes for a long, chronological walk through art history. It’s a fascinating gambit, and brilliantly executed,  to judge from new photos of the completed interior up at Architizer.

This is provocative, and I think a useful corrective to anyone who thinks the ROM’s Lee-Chin Crystal is an innovative museum design.

Sorry for the extended absence of this blog; more soon, I promise.

Most days, I spend all day and much of the evening lost in the internet. Lost, that is, figuratively. We think and talk in physical terms about the net, the web, the online world – and this metaphorical place often feels like it’s where I live.

But what does that mean? What is the world of the internet? For my friend the journalist Andrew Blum – architecture critic, Wired contributor, student of geography, and contrarian – that question was an invitation to explore the physical world of the net. The results became his book Tubes, which he’s promoting with a talk at U of T’s Rotman School today, Nov. 7.

The Globe and Mail reports today that Oxford Properties, the large developer that owns the Convention Centre and adjacent land in the middle of downtown Toronto, is aiming high with its redevelopment plan. They are proposing two high-rises that would top 1,000 feet.

I have two points on this. One, if anybody should build truly super-tall skyscrapers in Toronto, Foster and Partners are a good choice. And two, it’s not going to happen.

Let me explain.

In the current issue of Dwell, I have a story about the House on Limekiln Line by architect Lisa Moffitt. It’s a beautiful, small and sustaianably designed house in rural Huron County, Ontario.

Moffitt designed it for her mother-in-law, Maggie Treanor, with thought to green features – solar power, passive ventilation, radiant heating, lots of insulation and more..