Toronto: The Latest Architecture and News

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Between the late 1940s to the 1980s, Toronto, Canada, experienced a high rate of growth and development, resulting in a wealth of modernist-style buildings. Due to an increasing population, parishes were also outgrowing their spaces and found themselves in need of new facilities. Consequently, many well-designed modernist churches began to pop up throughout Toronto. This black and white photography series, titled Fifty/50 by Amanda Large, is an ode to these churches, and a celebration of their enduring importance to the city more than fifty years after their construction.

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A new train station by Toronto-based architecture studio PARTISANS has been approved for The Orbit, Canada's city of the future project. Designed to be a new central neighborhood for the Canadian town of Innisfil, the station was made in response to the potential arrival of high-speed mass transit that connects to downtown Toronto. The Transit Hub aims for rapid and responsible growth, fostering sustainable development and preserving the core attributes of Innisfil's landscape and community.

Perkins and Will have designed a new twisting School of Continuing Studies for York University in Toronto, Canada. Consolidating classes that are currently held across four buildings, the nearly 100,000 square foot building is made to become an iconic gateway site and showcase York's commitment to non-traditional students.

In May, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs announced that it would cancel its high-profile Quayside project because of “unprecedented economic uncertainty.” The statement marked the end of a three-year initiative to create a living, urban “testbed for emerging technologies, materials, and processes.”

Reversing the traditional order of city planning, Sidewalk Labs imagined building a new urban district on Toronto’s waterfront from the internet up, with sensors and other data collection infrastructure embedded in the fabric of a large city block. The ambitious development—with an area of 2.65 million square feet, including 1.78 million square feet of residential space—was to be built entirely from mass timber; indeed, the extensive use of modular cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated timber (glulam) was a chief selling point of the design (by Heatherwick Studio and Snøhetta, using a kit-of-parts developed by Michael Green Architecture).

A new pop-up intervention installs 50 private, clear, frameless, geodesic domes in the open spaces of Toronto, Canada. Created by Lmnts Outdoor Studio, the project aims to bring Yoga and fitness workouts safely, to an outdoor setting, while respecting social distancing measures.

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Highlighting proposals presented in international competitions, this week’s selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture combines various functions, diverse conceptual approaches, and innovative ideas. Submitted by our readers, these projects include an awarded pavilion in Vietnam, a cantilevered-bridge proposal in New York, and a sustainable botanical center in Poland, amongst others from all over the globe.

With a lot of projects coming in from China, we have compiled in this roundup, a design for a children’s hospital and education building, as well as a national science center encompassing research buildings, laboratories, exhibition spaces, commercial use, and public facilities. On another hand, for the first time, a virtual project is featured, celebrating the LGBTQ community with a vessel of a layered and labyrinthine system of baths, showers, and pools.

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Herzog & de Meuron have created a new design for a supertall skyscraper in Toronto. If built as planned, the project would rise to 1,063 feet and become the tallest residential building in Canada. Working together with project architect Quadrangle, the team was commissioned by Dutch real estate development companies Kroonenberg Geoep and ProWinko to design the new landmark for Toronto.

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Toronto's new Quayside smart city development by Sidewalk Labs has been cancelled. CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff announced in a Medium post that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has made the prototype no longer viable. As the subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, Sidewalk Labs aimed to "unlock the potential" of the city’s Eastern Waterfront.

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Centennial College, Ontario's first public college, has collaborated with DIALOG, Smoke Architecture, and EllisDon to design and build the first zero-carbon, mass timber higher-education building in the country. Scheduled for completion in 2023, the new gateway structure will bring together Indigenous and Western cultures in both form and function.

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