Recently in the Globe I wrote about an intriguing house project, in Toronto, by the Vancouver architect D’Arcy Jones. Abenbare House. It is a new bungalow, which replaces a 1950s builder bungalow on a suburban lot. That is an odd choice, formally, but the the house has a complex and very successful contemporary interior.

Pictures after the jump..

 The great 20th-century innovations in housing – open floor plans, strong connections to the outdoors, and forms and details that are cleanly geometric – came to Toronto in the 1950s, in the toolboxes of ordinary builders. The family’s old bungalow was a product of this diluted, mainstream modernism. Their new house shows how much life is left in the old modernist ideal, and how interesting it can be to make it new.

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In the Globe today I broke the details of a new building for the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

Designed by NADAAA, it will update an 1875 building at One Spadina Crescent and add on a sizeable new wing that combines landscape and architecture, and is artfully composed – it’ll offer 100,000 square feet of research, teaching and lab space, along with public programming and research in four pavilions around the edges, in a building that will be a dramatic example of 21st-century design in Toronto. It will house some discussion – and stir up discussion – about architecture, landscape, ecology, and big questions about city-building.

It is designed with a strong sustainability agenda and very cleverly composed – its 100,000 square foot bulk includes a public “street” that cuts across the circular site, and part of the building’s bulky studios are hidden below ground, but all of the large spaces are interwoven to share daylighting and circulation.

Around the outside of the circle, four pavilions will include a gallery  and research space for a thinktank called the Global Cities Institute – including a Model Cities Theatre and Lab that will test and display ideas about urban design and development. These pavilions, and a series of experimental green roofs on top of them, will be visible to the 50,000 people who pass daily on the streetcar and in traffic.

An east-west “street” through the building will provide a badly needed pedestrian link across the site.

Assuming it all comes together, it will set a strong example for contemporary architecture and landscape in the city.

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I recently had the sad assignment of writing an obituary for Edward Lam. Along with his wife, Deborah Moss, he ran the art practice Moss and Lam, who played a singular role in the interior-design world.

Principally M&L were, and are, close collaborators with Yabu Pushelberg, the Toronto- and New York-based designers who are among the most creative people in the field. By all accounts, Lam was an indispensable part of their shared work.

Moss and Lam make decorative work and installations – but their best work is innovative in its use of materials and techniques, surprising in its conceptual rigor, full of the unexpected, absolutely particular. It is, in a word, art.

I visited Moss and Lam in their studio a couple of years ago; it truly was a studio, full of works in progress, experiments in texture and materials.

Some of these played out in a massive mobile in Seoul, or sculptural fish in Chicago with Tony Chi, or in their furniture collection, led by Moss.

Edward Lam died suddenly and unexpectedly, and their work continues. Most of it is handmade by them and their staff of eight artists. Since most of the ornament in contemporary design is manufactured or digitally fabricated, this sets them apart. “There is a difference,” Moss told me. “People come to us because they can sense there is a hand behind these projects.” This makes them a sort of flashback to half a century ago, when craftsmanship was still an integral part of the building process. And until recently the hand – as well as the artist’s sensibility – was often Edward Lam’s.

In a 2011 interview at Moss & Lam’s Toronto studio, surrounded by a riot of models, sketches and paintings, Mr. Lam spoke of his work at [the restaurant] Blue Fin with quiet pride. “That wave wall has become our signature,” he said. “Somebody called to ask us how to do that treatment. And I said, ‘Well, you get some cement and some plaster, and the question is: How good is your hand?’ There are no secrets. That’s the secret.”

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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.

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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..

Heather Dubbeldam and her team oversaw a finely detailed contemporary renovation that benefits from a skylight, a carefully positioned trellis for shading, and beautiful integration of indoors and outdoors. (As well as serious insulation and a radiant heating system.) It is also, I think, very beautiful. Read more here.

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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.”

…The details of the new courtyard surface are carefully wrought. It is paved with inexpensive Unilock paving stones, in squares and rectangles, laid in an irregular pattern. Their scale makes the space feel large and their grey colour harmonizes with the sober palette of the garage. They also make way for gardens along each side – no tomatoes here, but about 20 varieties of shrubs and three Japanese maples. In high summer, “it’s completely wrapped in flora; there’s grass that wraps down onto the stones,” Mr. Wellington says. “It actually feels greener than it did before.”

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(You may remember them for their Bloc_10.)

It’ll be a provocative and memorable building.

Enjoy.

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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.

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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.

Witness 181 Davenport. This building and its twin 133 Hazelton will be new towers in Yorkville – downtown’s most exclusive neighbourhood – and they will look like this:

133 Hazelton

Ignore the poor quality of the renderings and just gaze upon these designs. Consider that their location is here – on the border of holy Yorkville and a cluster of postwar highrises.

I can hardly bring myself to argue what is wrong with this, in 2013. These buildings, by Page + Steele IBI, look like Parisian apartment blocks on growth hormones. They have nothing to do with Toronto, either with its Victorian design language or the local modernist tradition that remains strong and lively.

(Page and Steele is an old firm that, with Peter Dickinson in the mid-1950s, was a leading advocate for design in  Toronto. That particular legacy has been long lost. In its current form the office hasn’t done one building, as far as I know, that is worthy of praise.)

There are so many questions. Who are the buyers? What are they thinking? Do they dress in 19th-century costume? Have they seen what beige precast concrete looks like after a decade in Toronto?

But the biggest questions are for the builders. Their business is developing and constructing custom houses and, more recently, condos, always for the wealthy. They promise energy-efficient construction and good interior finishes, and I’m sure they will deliver. But what about their sense of civic responsibility? Well, here is what they say on their website:

It may be buildings we’re constructing, for residential, commerce and retail, but we’re aware that they have impact on people’s lives. They become a permanent part of physical identity with an influence on how people feel, live and experience the city. It is with that understanding of our business as one that’s about far more than merely bricks and mortar that we have put an emphasis on relationships with customers, architects, designers, local residents, city counselors and suppliers as the foundation of our work. We believe that development of the physical landscape of a city can be a good thing, not something accepted out of resignation to change, but welcomed and celebrated for the delight and improvements it brings.

A hulking slab of Euro-kitsch – clumsy in its proportions, dressed in a deeply tacky dress of concrete – will bring no delight to anybody: not preservationists, not the sophisticated global elite of the city, not even many average folks.

But these two buildings will remain for half a century or more, crowding the streetscape with their historically bad taste.

Let me close with a qualification: this is not the only bad development project in Toronto. This is why we need good Design Review Panels to review not many more building projects.  Toronto’s development industry is just not ready to make good decisions all by itself.

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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.

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