Toronto's low-key genius

I thought I knew Toronto. I've spent the past decade looking hard at its buildings, streets and neighbourhoods. But when I set out to update Toronto Architecture: A City Guide, written by journalist Patricia McHugh in the 1980s, I realized how much I'd been missing.

This collection of walking tours, which I expanded and updated, finds the city's history in its streets. Toronto's growth from a small Georgian town to a global metropolis is captured in its buildings: They tell its story, from the industrial 19 th century to the broadband 21st, from a very British, very Protestant outpost to today's diverse city. That is, if you know where to look.

It's a place with few grand visions, but a place that always manages to grapple with change, and wind up bigger and stronger. Today's condo-fication of downtown is bringing growing pains – but Toronto has been through much bigger surges before, and come out stronger.

Begin with the 1850s, when Toronto had barely 30,000 people. That little town built some very fine structures, from William Thomas's stately St. Lawrence Hall (1851) and stony Don Jail (1858) to Cumberland & Ridout's dignified St. James Cathedral (1853). Those conservative and well-made buildings tell you who was in charge: Anglican Tory lawyers.

But, within 40 years, the city was transformed by the railways and waves of immigration. The banks began to rise in importance, and showed off their pull with buildings like Frank Darling's rococo Bank of Montreal (1886) on Yonge Street, now the Hockey Hall of Fame. By the 1910s, the same architect was building a 16-storey skyscraper for Canadian Pacific Railway at King and Yonge. And people worried about the soullessness of all those tall buildings downtown. The more things change … Toronto in 1911 had more than 300,000 people – 10 times the number back in the 1850s. And that growth came in bits and pieces. The land holdings of the colonial elite were chopped up and sold by their families. Ever wonder why so many streets, such as Dundas and College/Carlton, take odd curves? Different private landowners laid out roads in different places.

Indeed, the most beloved neighbourhoods in the old City of Toronto were shaped by nothing grander than real-estate hustling. The beloved "bay and gable" houses of the 19 th-century city fit a lot of housing onto small lots, and their narrow fronts were easy to dress up with gables, ornamental brick and bargeboard. Regulation didn't make these places, and many of them would be impossible under today's rules. That Toronto was built ad hoc.

On the other hand, big ideas did shape Toronto after the Second World War, as the city went to a million people in 1951 and double that 30 years later. If you scan the horizon of the outer 416, you'll spot clusters of apartment high-rises. The planning of the 1960s, which guided the expansion of the city in the era of the car, imposed a logic on this sprawl: Builders got to create low-density crescents along with apartments that would add the necessary density. These towers have gone from middle-class housing to landing points for newcomers. You can't always see it as you cruise along Jane or Eglinton, but there's a growing challenge for architecture and planning in Toronto – the unexpected fruit of a grand vision.

Exploring this history, and the whole 20 th century, is crucial now. Patricia McHugh's tours hardly left downtown, and that was for a reason: Most of those who cared about cities in the 1980s were, like McHugh and her readers, devoted downtowners. Jane Jacobs, at the time, didn't see the suburbs for what they are: a different kind of city.

But most of Toronto dates from that remarkable period. Even as waves of immigrants remade the city's culture, its governments, school boards and businesses expanded and rebuilt it. In the 1950s and 1960s, local architects such as John B. Parkin Associates made Don Mills one of the best-designed districts of the era. The new City Hall, led by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, changed the city's self-image, its grand, democratic geometry wiping out the immigrant bustle of the Ward. John Andrews's monumental Scarborough College was celebrated around the world after it opened in 1966.

The heritage of that era, with brilliant designers such as Andrews, Peter Dickinson, John C. Parkin and Barton Myers, is still underappreciated. With a new generation's love for modernism, that's changing – and in the book I visit some obscure treasures, like Andrews's 1965 Bellmere Junior Public School in Scarborough, that deserve their attention.

Today, we can learn a lot from that period. Toronto architects did, and still do, have an unusual sensitivity for mixing old and new. In the 1960s, figures like George Baird, Jack Diamond and Myers took a good look at Victorian Toronto and found much to value; they introduced new buildings, such as Innis College and York Square, while preserving well-crafted old structures and understanding the wisdom in how they were laid out. That tradition survives today in places such as KPMB Architects' glorious Royal Conservatory of Music, and even Sweeny & Co's bravura QRC West, an office tower suspended in the air. And a wave of outsiders have shown the city how to be bold: Will Alsop's Sharp Centre at OCAD U is a new icon of the city.

Today, new ways of living, smaller families, and a desire to be downtown – not to mention climate change – are putting new pressures on Toronto. What to do? Look outdoors. Landscape architecture and public space matter more than ever. The firm PUBLIC WORK is redesigning an area under the Gardiner Expressway as the Bentway, bringing culture and recreation to a dense apartment neighbourhood – and new life to the venerable Fort York. They're following the example of strong landscapes, including Claude Cormier's Sugar Beach, that are remaking the eastern waterfront. That waterfront, which has lain fallow for a century, is taking shape as a fine 21st-century neighbourhood. With luck, Toronto might regain its origins as a lakefront city – even as it continues to surprise me, and all of us.

Alex Bozikovic is The Globe and Mail's architecture critic. He is the co-author of Toronto Architecture: A City Guide, which is published June 27 by McClelland & Stewart.