With summer coming to an end and nature's most colourful season just around the corner, I'm reminded of an architectural style that put as much emphasis on the view from the building as it put on the view of the building itself. Regency style buildings sought to connect architecture and nature, often with a touch of whimsy. Few examples were ever built here and even fewer remain, but they are more than worth a mention. The Regency Style began in England in the early nineteenth century when the Prince Regent (George IV) commissioned English architect John Nash to design a whimsical palace in the Indo-Gothic style. The Royal Pavilion at Brighton has nothing comparable in Canada, but the essence of its inspiration is linked to the Regency style cottages that began to appear all over Ontario a few decades later. Retiring British officers were the originators, bringing with them memories of the distant countries where they'd served the King. Set within the landscape, these houses were part of the picturesque movement which placed great importance on the connection between the building and the landscape ensuring beautiful views to and from the building. The context of these buildings was so important that the main reason they no longer exist is that as the city grew around them they lost their deliberate connection to their location becoming confined to small city lots. This combined with advanced age meant that most examples disappeared long ago.

Toronto has been inhabited for thousands of years. During those years countless structures were built housing the aboriginal peoples who lived here but today there are only archaeological remains from those periods that describe the city's oldest structures and the beginning of architecture here. When humans arrived in what is now Toronto approximately 12,000 years ago they were proto-Algonquian speakers, a nomadic people, travelling the land to hunt and gather what they needed to survive. The structures they built were not meant for permanent habitation. What they actually looked like or how they were constructed remains a mystery. When a shift towards agricultural society developed with the arrival of Iroquoian-speaking people between 500 and 1300AD, semi-permanent settlements and structures began to appear too. These settlements contained a small number of elliptically shaped houses encircled by a fence or a single-row palisade. By the beginning of the 14th century these settlements had developed into large fortified villages. These villages were located throughout southern Ontario and in Toronto specifically within the Humber, Don and Rouge river drainage systems. Two of the best known were the Humber settlement called Teiaiagon (near where Baby Point is now located) and the settlement of Ganatsekwyagon near the mouth of the Rouge River. The type of structures built were a response to the environmental conditions and the materials available, resulting in the building most commonly found in the Toronto area: the longhouse.

Though I maintain Toronto's first architectural style was The Georgian, I want to give a more humble form of early architecture its time in the spotlight too: the log building. It's a structure somewhat tied to our national mythology of intrepid settlers forging a new nation from his (and her) humble log dwelling. It seems like every Canadian childhood involved a trip to some sort of pioneer village, where log buildings were abound and the roots of our communities were on display and conveyed to us through timber. In Canada the log house sprang up out of an odd set of circumstances. The big European powers that largely founded our county and influenced so much of our history (France and England) have no real tradition of building with logs. French Canadians began to use wood in their construction (though they were more inclined to use stone) because trees were so unavoidable here. However, when considering log buildings as we know them today, the credit goes to the Swedes who brought their traditional log architecture to North America. The short lived colony of New Sweden (1638-1655), located in present day Delaware at the mouth of the Delaware River introduced the log structures of Sweden to the English and Dutch settlers in the area. It was a suitable type of construction given the conditions in the area and eventually spread to all parts of the colonies. Loyalists brought it to Canada and British settlers began to build homes using the materials and techniques as well. It is somewhat fitting then that the building regarded as Toronto's oldest structure, Scadding Cabin, is built of logs. Reputed to have been built in 1795 and originally located on the east shore of the Don River near Queen Street, the house was moved to its present location on the Exhibition Grounds by the York Pioneer Society in 1879. An early example of an appreciation for local history, the move was planned to coincide with the opening of the Toronto Industrial Exhibition (or as we know it today, the CNE). Built for John Scadding, clerk to the first Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, the one room cabin is constructed of squared, white pine logs with dovetailed corners. Though it is now completely removed from its original context, it is a demonstrative example of what some of Toronto's earliest structures would have looked like. Structures like the Osterhout Log Cabin in the Guildwood Village area of Scarborough, built in 1795 for Augustus Jones, (also an early employee of Mr. Simcoe as Scarborough's surveyor), the house is similar in layout and design as the Scadding Cabin and is Scarborough's oldest building.

  Toronto is a Georgian city. It's our first architectural style and the basis of our city's grid plan. There may not be much of it around, but it has left a lasting legacy. Described most simply as a style of proportion and balance, symmetry and simplicity, the Georgian structure was a conception of the classical architecture of Greece or Rome through the lens of renaissance England.  The style came out of the Palladian architecture of the Italian Renaissance that emerged as a style of the wealthy in England, Ireland and Scotland, before being simplified in detail and material in the era of the King Georges from 1714-1830. It was suited to the rapidly expanding urban areas of England and, for colonists in the United States, it was often a direct reminder of home. When the Loyalists moved north following the American Revolution they brought the style with them as a sign of their loyalty to Britain and as a means of identifying themselves in their new homeland. Further waves of British settlers after helped sustain it. In the wilderness that was Toronto at the end of the 18th century, Georgian architecture represented calm, order and good taste, and was just the style a country wishing to characterize ‘peace, order and good government' needed. It's no wonder that when plans were drawn up for Toronto as early as 1788 (five years prior to the establishment of the settlement), rational Georgian planning was at work. When a system of surveying and dividing the land was created in 1792, it was acting deputy surveyor General David William Smith (1764-1837) who, working for the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canadna, John Graves Simcoe (1752-1806), devised a checkered plan, in which townships were 9 miles wide, 12 miles deep, each with fourteen concessions of 24 200 acre lots.  This plan became dominant in Upper Canada creating the concessions and roads that would later become our highways and major thoroughfares. Toronto's regularly spaced arterial roads are a Georgian planning legacy.

Postmodern architecture may often be equated with the excess of the 80s and may be derided along with shoulder pads and power suits as an unfortunate byproduct of its time, but it was making a point. It was a response to the ‘less is more' philosophy that had dominated architecture since the rise of Modernism and the International Style beginning in the 1920s, when modernism was the design aesthetic of choice for everything from government buildings and bank towers to gas stations and churches. Architecture was ...

Toronto is a city of bungalows. Though we'd fancy ourselves as a city of tall and thin Victorians, tightly packed together on narrow streets, Toronto spreads low and humbly. Once you leave the older parts of the city and drive through the sprawling post-war neighbourhoods of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough, more likely than not all you'll see are neatly spaced bungalows row after row (with groupings of apartment towers thrown in). These houses encompass numerous styles -- from Neo-Tudor to Contempo, Ranch and War Time -- and they all have value ...

Casa Loma may be Toronto's favourite and best-known castle, but chateaus still abound. The chateau style was used all over the world, most often for private estates, hotels, and train stations. In this regard Toronto was no different. The style enjoyed a long run of popularity in Canada from 1880 to 1940. Toronto and almost all major Canadian cities can boast at least one good example of the style, lending its iconic status to this country. In Toronto it is even enjoying something of a revival (though often falling short of most originals). ...

Another one bites the dust. Not that the potential loss of a McDonald's restaurant causes me any particular heartache, but this particular McDonald's always tugs at my heartstrings. Across from the ROM just west of Avenue road sits (in my opinion) the nicest McDonalds around, and a fine piece of 1970s retail architecture. During a closed-door session, city council voted to accept a (bargain) $3.38 million offer for the site from McDonald's, who will in turn sell it to Kazakhstan-based developer Bazis International Inc. That's the developing firm that is ...

Given the winter we've been having it would seem impossible to think of Toronto as being in any way exotic, much less to draw comparisons between our city and one in Morocco or the Middle East. That is, until you encounter a work of exotic revival architecture. Like many cities within the sphere of Anglo-American influence, Victorian Toronto had a small love affair what they saw as the "exotic" architectural forms of Islam. Bearing few children, this affair left only small vestiges behind. These buildings, often described simply as "Moorish," ...

Toronto is pretty flat, but it's no prairie. Perhaps that's why the Prairie style didn't catch on. While it's not surprising that a style so closely associated with the US Midwest wouldn't make a large impact here, it is surprising that within a place like Toronto, where eclecticism was and is often the order of the day, the Prairie style wasn't at least experimented with. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is one of those architects that almost everyone has heard of, and it was under his leadership that ...