Architecture

The Gardiner Expressway, which was completed in 1965 and runs along Toronto’s shoreline with Lake Ontario, is considered by many residents as a barrier between the city and its lakefront. To bridge the divide, a novel public space was opened in 2018 to bring a section of the highway’s underbelly to life by transforming it into a public park. The Bentway is used year-round: in winter it becomes a public ice-skating rink and in summer it hosts farmers’ markets, concerts and other events that have turned this once-overlooked part of Toronto’s built landscape into a thriving public space.
thebentway.ca

Robarts Library, the 1973-built brutalist brainchild of firm Mathers & Haldenby, is a gargantuan 14-storey block of concrete that houses the University of Toronto’s book collection. Despite its hard appearance it has a rather soft nickname – the Peacock – thanks to the resemblance it bears to the bird. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library forms the body, with the main building appearing as a fanned-out tail. Umberto Eco, the Italian author of The Name of the Rose, was thought to have used Robarts as the model for the library depicted in his book.

Toronto isn’t a city known for the playfulness of its public spaces but the golden bone atop the Victorian-styled cast-iron fountain in Berczy Park could be a sign that things are changing. Staring hungrily up at the bone are a boxer, a St Bernard and some pugs: hand-painted statues with jets of water spraying from their mouths, which converge gracefully at the fountain’s apex. The somewhat absurd fountain is the centrepiece of the recently renovated park, as conceived by landscape architect Claude Cormier on a tight triangular plot on the east side of Toronto’s downtown.