Friday July 25, 2008
Latest Columns 
Where playful, irreverent designs blossom
Published: Saturday, July 12, 2008 12:00 AM Page R5
Summertime and the gardens are growing. They're growing up, lush and green, with all of this rain, and growing up, too, as the latest temples of design. Once considered a hallowed preserve of flowers, shrubs and trees, the garden has become a three-dimensional plaything manipulated by architects, landscape architects, graphic designers - even sound engineers. At the stunning Jardins de Metis in the Gaspesie and in the heart of Quebec City, the garden designs being presented this summer are defined by their playful irreverence and dark irony. So much for the peony.
A G-G winner bows to the power of landscape
Published: Saturday, June 21, 2008 12:00 AM Page R9
Canadian architect Ian MacDonald designs architecture provoked by the rise and fall of landscape. His private homes push up like outcrops of rock, they float planes of green roofs above the ground or they compress deep down, capturing light from slots in the earth. For his own family home in Toronto's Wychwood Park, winner of a 2008 Governor-General's Medal in Architecture, there are zones of defensible private space: walls of dry-laid sandstone or poured in place concrete which define intimate courtyards and privileged views of the enveloping forest.
So many promises: Were they just a tall tale?
Published: Saturday, June 7, 2008 12:00 AM Page R4
A skyscraper that British architect Norman Foster promised would deliver innovation and urban vitality to Calgary's downtown has suffered some serious blows. The cuts to the original design vision - elimination of suspended sky pods and the filling in of a soaring atrium - may satisfy the owner's bottom line, but they will also hurt the city's attempt to ride its economic boom in style.
Putting buildings in the paws of the people
Published: Saturday, May 31, 2008 12:00 AM Page M3
In this game, everybody gets to be judge and style arbiter. Trust your eyes, trust your gut and answer the question: Do you love it or hate it? The fourth annual online Pug Awards, the people's choice for good and bad new architecture in Toronto, has gained enough credibility and votes that it will probably spread to Vancouver next year. The goal is to stir the pot about architecture, and that's a laudable mission.
Engaging the true north, charred and pitted
Published: Saturday, May 24, 2008 12:00 AM Page R10
When we sing that familiar song about the true north strong and free, we comfort ourselves with thoughts of a mythic north with lakes too numerous to name and great outcroppings of granite travelling hard along the land. Images of Sudbury and other northern cities don't even register in our minds.
Hallowed be thy secular space
Published: Saturday, May 3, 2008 12:00 AM Page R14
It's very private and beautiful with the light that comes into the alley. Artists are expressing themselves in a way they're not allowed to in traditional institutions. The alley has a sense of ruin, of sweet decay.
Our city needs a booster shot of imagination
Published: Saturday, April 26, 2008 12:00 AM Page M5
OLD CITY HALL: BECOMING THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE CREATIVE CITY Most of us know Old City Hall by its triple-arched entrance and the clock tower that guides us north from the bottom of Bay Street. But walk inside, past the intricate ornaments carved into the rugged arches of stone and up the grand stairs - you will be shocked to discover the lightness of democracy gracing its golden entrance hall. Here, a monumental stained-glass window floods the entire two-storey room with light. One of Toronto's most stylish halls is also the city's best-kept secret.
In Chicago, genius with a twist
Published: Saturday, April 19, 2008 12:00 AM Page R11
It's always dangerous to declare somebody a genius. Sometimes it's dangerous even to think it.Yet there is a man in our midst who wanders about with a palette of watercolours in his back pocket; who hardly cares to know the date; who is a gentle, approachable soul with a Valencian accent; who designs museums and bridges like birds in flight, and a promenade for the new PATH train station at the World Trade Center with ribs like those of a whale.
An artist's touch: design inspiration
Published: Saturday, March 29, 2008 12:00 AM Page R5
To rock people's world is the job assignment of any artist. To rock it while bowing to the constraints of site, structure and budget falls to the not-so-lucky, slightly beleaguered architect. Both may be creative types, but because of the nature of their work, artists and designers have to think differently. Which is why artists such as Douglas Coupland and Jill Anholt, both of Vancouver, are being asked to lend their unfettered minds to the making of parks and civic architecture.
Tinting the sky to death one tower at a time
Published: Saturday, March 15, 2008 12:00 AM Page R1
A sickly green patina has washed over the glass towers of our cities. It is the awful colour of hospital corridors and encroaching disease. Green-tinted glass has metastasized from Vancouver to Toronto to New York to Shanghai, dumbing down the exhilarating potential of the skyscraper, mortifying the skyline.
