Toronto

Freelance writer, photographer and artist Erin FitzGibbon shares in this insider's guide to Toronto her favourite places in savvy lists of 500 hidden secrets and addresses.

Remnants of Mid-Century Toronto is a collection of photos by Vik Pahwa — interspersed with short essays and features by local architects — documenting the sometimes beautiful, sometimes neglected collection of mid-century structures that still stand today, dotting Toronto’s urban landscape.

In the final years of the nineteenth century, Toronto architects started to consider how their city, through progressive architecture and urban planning, could be made "modern." Making Toronto Modern constructs Toronto's architectural past to create a compelling narrative of how new ideas about modernism were debated, received, and embodied in new buildings. Through a close examination of political debates, architectural journals, and home design magazines, Christopher Armstrong describes the competing motivations and ideals that influenced the ways in which the city was built.

From small residences to Cultural Renaissance projects-all completed between 1992 and 2010 - this guidebook features over 60 contemporary buildings, landscapes, and public spaces that have transformed Toronto.

Toronto has been hailed as "the city that works, " "the livable city, " and a "world-class city." But just what does Toronto look like? And what can the changing image of the city tell us about Toronto's past--and its future? Twenty-two self-contained walking tours--each with an easy-to-follow map--range over 175 years of Toronto buildings. More than 900 buildings are catalogued: fanciful Victorian houses, graceful spired churches, lush Edwardian factories and warehouses, Art Deco apartments, and new landmarks. Illustrated with over 300 photographs, the guide examines well-known and important buildings as well as the more modest structures in between that form Toronto's cityscape.

At a time when modern architecture has become a means for cities to up their game and raise their cultural profile on the world stage, Toronto is coming into its own. Fully entrenched in a design renaissance that is dramatically changing the face and space of the city, Toronto is now a welcome playground for celebrated local talent and international star architects. While some cities can be immediately defined by a specific style, Toronto is distinguished instead by a fusion of contemporary architecture, heritage preservation and sustainable urban design. A true mosaic of architecture and culture, Toronto is a city learning to recognise and celebrate its diversity - it is a city set to rediscover itself. Design City: Toronto showcases over thirty exemplary contemporary interior and architectural projects, both complete and underway. These range from hip restaurants and bars by Toronto-based practices to major institutional buildings completed by the likes of Will Alsop, Behnisch, Behnisch & Partners, Foster and Partners, Frank Gehry, Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg and Daniel Libeskind. Written in an engaging and lively manner, the book is beautifully illustrated with new photography by Tom Arban. It also provides a neighbourhood overview and biographies of featured designers. It should appeal as much to design savvy individuals as local and foreign archi-tourists who are as interested in discovering - or rediscovering - the dynamic evolution of this exciting city.

Lost Toronto [...] traces the cherished places in a city that time, progress and fashion swept aside before the National Register of Historic Places could save them from the wrecker's ball. As well as celebrating forgotten architectural treasures, Lost Toronto looks at buildings that have changed use, vanished under a wave of new construction or been drastically transformed. Beautiful archival photographs and informative text allows the reader to take a nostalgic journey back in time to visit some of the lost treasures that the city let slip through its grasp. Organised chronologically, starting with the earliest losses and ending with the latest, the book features much-loved Toronto institutions that have been consigned to history. Losses include: King's College, Holland House, Hotel Hanlan, St. Patrick's Market, The Grand Opera House, Metropolitan Methodist Church,  Old Union Station, St. Andrew's Market, Yonge Street Arcade, Sunnyside Beach Amusement Park, Shea's Hippodrome, S. S. Cayuga, High Park Mineral Baths, Tivoli Theatre, Riverdale Zoo, Odeon Carlton, Cyclorama on Front Street, Eaton's Santa Claus Parade, Colonial Tavern, Sam the Record Man, The World's Biggest Book Store.

Jerome Markson's nearly six-decade-long architectural practice began in a time of profound transformation during the post-war period. His buildings were harbingers of important shifts in sociopolitical attitudes, urban policies, and modes of architectural production. From speculative homes in fledgling suburbs, to bespoke private houses, to social housing in downtown Toronto, to luxury landmarks like the Market Square condominiums, as well as important cultural and institutional buildings, his architecture reflects his pursuit of a more open and inclusive expression of modernity, one that moved past late-Modernism's formal legibility in favour of an increasingly idiosyncratic formal, spatial, and material expression. Toronto's Inclusive Modernity: The Architecture of Jerome Markson is the first comprehensive critical assessment of Markson's diverse body of work, interwoven with an account of Toronto's emergence as a cosmopolitan city. Extensive illustrations include wide-format collages by Scott Norsworthy, capturing Markson's buildings in their urban environments today; architectural drawings; and contemporaneous images from the popular press, such as Maclean''s and Chatelaine magazines. The significance of Markson's work is examined through three main themes: his prescient use of photography to situate architecture as an inclusive cultural medium and object of human desire; his nuanced responsiveness to Toronto's fast-evolving urban and suburban geographies; and the ways in which his diverse influences--including the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, Britain's Townscape movement, and his encounters with vernacular architecture--were instrumental in his development of a more pluralistic, materially-oriented approach.

In Packaged Toronto: A Collection of the City's Historic Design, Spacing's Matthew Blackett teams up with City of Toronto museum curators Wayne Reeves and Alexandra Avdichuk to reveal a treasure trove of early local package design from the city's vast collection. Through detailed photography and historical essays focused on an underserved period of Canadian design, Packaged Toronto takes readers on a journey back in time to the period between 1870-1950 to witness the emergence of the city's aesthetic.

In this unique book, Blackett visually explores the condition of Toronto’s laneways, where century-old garages and former workshops are locked in a constant battle with modernity, graffiti, and nature itself. Many of Toronto’s laneways are messy, dilapidated, overgrown, hazardous... and also strikingly beautiful. The distinct structures featured in this book not only shed a light on those who used these spaces before us, but reveal so much more about ourselves than our prim-and-proper front yards.

Celebrating Toronto's built heritage of row houses, semis, and cottages and the people who lived in them. Despite their value as urban property, Toronto's workers' cottages are often characterized as being small, cramped, poorly built, and in need of modernization or even demolition. But for the workers and their families who originally lived in them from the 1820s to the 1920s, these houses were far from modest. Many had been driven off their ancestral farms or had left the crowded conditions of tenements in their home cities abroad. Once in Toronto, many lived in unsanitary conditions in makeshift shantytowns or cramped shared houses in downtown neighbourhoods such as The Ward. To then move to a self-contained cottage or rowhouse was the result of an unimaginably strong hope for the future and a commitment to family life. Through the stories of eight families who lived in these "Modest Hopes," authors Don Loucks and Leslie Valpy bring an important but forgotten part of the Toronto narrative to life. They illuminate the development of Toronto's working-class neighbourhoods, such as Leslieville, Corktown, and others, and explain the designs and architectural antecedents of these undervalued heritage properties.

Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto visually compares historic and contemporary images of different parts of Toronto to better understand how and why the city has changed.

Leading architect E.J. Lennox designed Casa Loma for the flamboyant Sir Henry Pellatt and Mary, Lady Pellatt as an enormous castellated mansion that overlooked the booming metropolis of Toronto. The first scholarly book dedicated to this Canadian landmark, Casa Loma situates the famous "house on the hill" within Toronto's architectural, urban, and cultural history.Casa Loma was not only an outsized home for the self-appointed "Lord Toronto" but a statement of Canada's association with empire, an assertion of the country's British legacy. During and after the Pellatts' occupation, Casa Loma was a major landmark, and it has since infiltrated the iconography and collective memory of the metropolis. The reception of Casa Loma, variously loved and abhorred by Torontonians, reflects many of Toronto's major aspirations and anxieties about itself as a modern city. Across ten chapters, this book charts the history of Casa Loma from the purchase of the estate atop Davenport Ridge in 1903 and its construction from 1906, through to its sale and the dispersal of its contents in 1924, its subsequent life as a hotel, and finally its transformation into one of the city's major entertainment venues.Casa Loma brings to light a wealth of hitherto unpublished archival images and documentation of the house's visual and material culture, weaving together a textured account of the design, use, and life of this unique building over the course of the twentieth century.

An incisive view of Toronto's development over the last fifty years. In Toronto Reborn, Ken Greenberg describes the emerging contours of a new Toronto. Focusing on the period from 1970 to the present, Greenberg looks at how the work and decisions of citizens, NGOs, businesses, and governments have combined to refashion Toronto. Individually and collectively, their actions -- renovating buildings and neighbourhoods, building startling new structures and urban spaces, revitalizing old cultural institutions and creating new ones, sponsoring new festivals and events -- have transformed the old postwar city, changing it into an exciting modern one.