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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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.

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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.

From the story:

What notan looks like, in this case, is the carefully orchestrated play of mass, light and shadow. In the large living-dining area, this is visible if you look carefully. AKB have designed subtle indentations – reveals is the term-of-art – where the walls meet the ceiling and floor. This has a potent effect: Notice it, and the walls are transformed into objects. “Shadow is a powerful tool for shaping space in an all-white environment,” says [architect Kelly Buffey].

Here are more photos, by James Brittain:

A few words from Kelly Buffey:

We are not striving to achieve a minimalist “style” in our work. Rather we approach each project with the intention of using only the essential elements, using them thoughtfully and with incredibly precise detailing.  Inspirations such as James Turrell, his use of light to create unexpected experiences of space and perceptions of depth, have shaped our approach to architecture.  Or Peter Zumthor’s Baths at Vals, which have a stereotomic feeling as if the building was carved out of the mountain stone, a feeling he achieved by using one consistent material throughout on floors, walls and ceilings, interspersed with strategically placed natural light slots from above and framed views of the mountains beyond the bath walls.  By approaching the work in this manner, we aspire to create architecture that is most memorable in experience rather than aesthetic.

Here it works, beautifully. Read more.

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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).

And I also covered Dubbeldam’s Cabbagetown House (PDF) for Designlines in 2009 – the photo above is of a room in that house, which was an extremely creative and impeccably detailed renovation of a 19th-century Toronto house.

BlackLAB are a much newer firm – they’ve been in business only a year – but they have launched with a series of promising projects. I see a lot of talent and drive there. Check out my post and article for The Globe and Mail about their Bloordale renovation, home to BlackLAB’s Andrea Kordos and Tony Round, which showed what they can do in a classic small-house, small-budget situation.

Enjoy the shows.

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