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And now, for his next trick, Toronto architect Peter Clewes will make a new condominium stack in the city's St. Lawrence neighbourhood materialize out of thin air, then instantly sell out to savvy buyers in the audience. Presto!

This scenario is not as wacky as it sounds. Throughout Toronto's current condo boom, developers have been putting up, at a bewildering clip, tall and very popular buildings designed by Mr. Clewes. As for the prolific architect himself, he seems to pull new mid-priced condo schemes out of his hat, like a magician producing live bunnies from nowhere, with remarkable ease and speed and to widespread critical applause. The results, so far, have been pleasing, svelte boxes with gleaming faces of glass, and with much evidence of the architect's modernist affection for right-angle corners and flat-topped, broad-shouldered profiles.

In the Context Developments project proposed to rise in the St. Lawrence Market area, the podium, which contains the parking, and the high-rise block of this composition, named Market Wharf, are straight-up boxes, to be sure. The layouts of the apartments inside are also entirely conventional.

But in this building, immediately south of St. Lawrence Market on Lower Jarvis Street, Mr. Clewes has made his most interesting deviations to date from the strict modern aesthetics of exterior effect, and perhaps his most striking artistic contribution to our skyline.

All is not perfect, however, with Mr. Clewes's handiwork. The hard street-wall of the podium is made mostly of two-storey glass sheets, behind which will spread the harshly lit aisles of a mammoth Shoppers Drug Mart. While I can't imagine that residents will like having a super-sized store at the foot of their building, or that pedestrians will be fond of that cascade of glazed curtain wall, putting an 18,000-square-foot retail establishment at grade makes a certain rough sense: The famous old market next door has long made this spot a place of trade, so adding a drugstore to the mix doesn't strike me as particularly odd.

Be that as it may, the best architectural feature of the brick-faced podium is its window system, if anything so lively and eccentric can be called a system at all. Rectangular openings of different sizes skip and dance across the façade, creating a kind of abstract surface with cinematic swing and syncopation. The podium treatment is one of Mr. Clewes's departures from his usual dressy modernism.

The slab is another. While it's hardly strange to see a piece of cereal-box residential architecture in Toronto, you'd have to look far and wide to find one this romantic. The balcony guards that extend in long horizontal sweeps across the west and east facades of the building undulate gently, sensuously. Once this structure is up, these waving bands, executed in fritted glass, could resemble silky ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Tinted by the light of dusk, the slab's western surface could look like an animated screen of glowing colour. In any case, such dramatic optical effects in a tall building, rare downtown, are good things this condominium block will likely produce.

I love the name of this project. It dispenses with the blah placelessness of so many condo-tower titles and succinctly invokes the history of its site. In Toronto's first half-century, before the Lake Ontario shoreline was pushed south by landfill and the eastern city was cut off from the water by the railway corridor, on this place stood one of the principal wharves that brought the world's goods to Toronto. Market Wharf is a welcome reminder of the city's past glory as a premier Great Lakes port.

Toronto Street update

It's official.

The new southward extension of Fennings Street into the campus of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) will be known henceforth as White Squirrel Way.

The name is an abomination.

As the massive overhaul of the hospital unfolds, streets are to penetrate the monolithic site from two sides.

The goal is to transform the hospital into what CAMH calls an "urban village" of normal buildings stitched into the urban fabric by means of "normal" thoroughfares. CAMH is keen to shed the stigma of a crazy house isolated from ordinary urban life.

So what has the hospital done to announce its brave change of image?

It has dubbed its first through street after the albino rodents that scamper on its lawns. They are, of course, abnormal creatures, much like what many people believe the mentally ill to be.

Then consider the slang mutation of "squirrel" into "squirrelly," meaning nuts.

What a name for a new street into a hospital trying to rescue its patients and itself from a reputation for oddity!

The hospital should change the name to something that clearly indicates CAMH's relation to its neighbourhood: South Fennings Street or perhaps Lower Fennings Street, or — the best option — just Fennings Street.

Any one of these monikers would signal that CAMH is sincere in wanting to join the city after nearly 160 years of isolation from it.