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Last week, as part of an ongoing bid to catch up on summer movies, I went to see Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. I did not like it, but never mind: This is not a film review. I bring up this picture here because of Altman's curious decision to decorate his present-day story — one character has a cellphone and another arrives in this year's model limousine, so you know it's happening now — in dusty beige costumery and furniture, and other anachronistic doodads, from the 1940s.

Such mish-mashing of contemporary props and historical styles does not work in a movie. And it can get pretty dismaying even in a big city, where most people are accustomed to seeing pastiches of building styles from every period of history. But when is Toronto going to outgrow the mediocre architectural Victorianism sprouting up everywhere across our twenty-first century city?

For an example of what I'm objecting to, take a walk down Sudbury Street, on the cusp of west-side downtown and Parkdale.

Until the mid-1990s, Sudbury was home to factories and warehouses belonging to the old Massey-Harris farm-machinery enterprise. I remember one building in this complex with special affection. It was a vast, rambling shed with a flat roof and a glass curtain wall, built along the north side of the street in 1948 to house an assembly-line operation that produced agricultural combines. The beauty of this factory was accidental, of course, but it was real. When driving along Sudbury between home and office some 20 years ago, I often slowed down to admire the building's gleaming skin, its crisply joined volumes, and its alert, no-nonsense modernity.

Then came the end of Massey-Harris, along with much other industrial production in Toronto's downtown. The demolition of the combine plant soon followed, and that was followed in turn by the residential redevelopment of the street.

With some imagination, and — the hard part — a green light from the developer, the architect of these new houses could have brought forth townhomes in the best contemporary manner: simple and sharp, with smart, flat-topped facades on the street. We live in a time when the vernacular modern style — actually, it's an update of clean-lined glass and steel Modernism from the middle of the last century — is something many architects can do satisfactorily. If their designs are not always stirring, they can at least make a contribution to the urban landscape by saying: I'm here-and-now.

Or, failing an up-to-date treatment, the houses on Sudbury could at least have recalled the most memorable aspects of Toronto's Victorian terrace houses, such as front porches, bay windows, and well-sculpted gables that cast picturesque shadows. As things have turned out, the facades along the street are flat and the gables have a flimsy, stuck-on look.

The effect of the architecture here, and elsewhere in the Massey lands on Toronto's west side, is not truly awful. It is simply vacuous, with neither the strong lines and glassy transparency of the modern factory buildings that preceded it nor the charm of Toronto's most interesting Victorian row houses. If the last traces of the city's industrial heritage are to be swept away — a process that seems unstoppable at the moment — we can hope the housing stock that replaces the factories will pack architectural punch.

Not that a punch, by itself, is a guarantee that all is well. The individual houses in the large Toronto residential development known as the Beach Neighbourhood, for instance, are well-designed expressions of the dare-to-be-Victorian tendency in late 20th-century American architecture. They adequately express the ideals of their designers: to evoke a time when folks sat on porches, neighbours swapped recipes over backyard fences, and life was gentler than it is nowadays. The architectural gesture is, I suppose, nice, if retrograde.

But something has long struck me as missing in the Beach Neighbourhood. Urban neighbourhoods that really work almost always have jumbled street life and a friendly knit into the urban fabric. The busy mix of shops and services that makes the adjacent, older Beaches district engaging has made very little headway westward along Queen Street into the Beach Neighbourhood, which, after several years of build-out, still has the look and feel of a gated community.

Avoiding this problem would involve taking seriously the notion that the best communities are ones in which mix and diversity are honoured. This kind of commitment is at work in plans for Regent Park and for the Toronto waterfront. It's time that private developers adopted similar ideas, and started building neighbourhoods that not only are contemporary, but also look it.

The most interesting thing that could happen, as Toronto continues to convert old places into new housing precincts, is an affirmation of Modernist energy and inspiration. That would mean abandonment by private developers once and for all of their long-standing romance with nostalgic Victoriana and a recovery of the best design ideals of Modernism.