Visiting Chicago last weekend I thought it might be a good idea to take some notes for Spacing.  This would be, I thought, in line with Matt Blackett's 2007 post and Shawn Micallef''s two posts from 2006, and after all isn't it always a good idea to keep an eye on your sister (city)?  So, in that spirit, here are some "do's" from Chicago.  Originally I thought it would be good to do an urban "do's" and "don'ts", but … I didn't manage to come up with any "don'ts" in the end so looks like we'll just have to make do with a list of "do's". DO:  Many tall buildings that relate to one another.  While it is hardly an original point, it is always worth pointing out the vibrancy of a compact cluster of tall buildings.  There can so much hesitancy in Toronto around building tall that it sometimes seems like we need to be reminded of the value of heightened density, even if only from a purely poetic perspective, never mind the practical aspects.

An article in the New York Times yesterday gives some credence to the idea of viable car-free suburbs. This of course is the type of development people tend to look askance at even the suggestion of. According to our conventional history, after all, the explosion of the suburbs in the middle of the 20th century is closely tied to the popular availability of the automobile. The very idea of the suburb is so closely tied in our minds to famous car-based developments such as Levittown that the notion of a car-free suburb ...

The venerable Canadian Council for the Arts recently announced the winner of this years Prix de Rome for Emerging Practitioners. This years winner is young Toronto architect Drew Sinclair, a recent graduate from University of Toronto. Drew's thesis project, entitled Impossible Properties deals directly, and in a delightfully whimsical fashion, with Toronto's urban fabric. I thought that it might be of some interest here. His description of the work: Impossible Properties was a theoretical project designed for 11 intersections and blocks located along Bathurst Street in Toronto. The project involved creating a mapped inventory of ‘topographical, architectural, and urban irregularities’ and then writing new ‘Local Codes’, based on the observed idiosyncrasies, that would become guidebooks for future development at the specific sites. The projected attempted to replace the authority of municipal by-laws and building code with a system that allowed individual actors to author and enact major changes to urban form. The images illustrate both the sites as they exist today and the accumulated influence of 50 years of Local Code. This work raises some interesting questions for me about the importance of local building ordinances and their effects on the nature of the built environment. What should the scope of such ordinances be? Could they be the instrument of poetry? Whimsy? See the work after the jump . . .

Toronto is in the midst of a building boom, and what with the new and continuing onslaught of proposed condo towers in the city, I would be surprised if this slows down anytime soon. But our own small boom pales in comparison to some of the notable explosions of building occurring around the world. China, for instance, is estimated to be building 870 million square meters of new residential floor area per year. This global atmosphere of rapid (and frenetic) building is turning out to be something of a playground for contemporary architects eager to try out ...

For a while now I've been trying to wrap my head around exactly what the plans are for the Queen West Triangle. While the slew of developments slotted for the area have been on my radar, it's been such a flurry I've been having a hard time both keeping them straight and understanding how they relate to one another. In order to aid the public understanding of this contentious group of developments, I have thrown together the following image. While based on material obtained from the City, it is entirely my own interpretation. It is a key -- more detailed information follows, below. Running briefly through the developments...