NowToronto

Architecture

Architecture in Toronto

Toronto builds in bursts and rarely in one style, so its centre reads as a sequence of separate decisions. New work here usually has to sit against something that ignores it.

• Ontario Court of Justice

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  Completed 2023

  Renzo Piano Building Workshop

  A courthouse north of the city hall, consolidating criminal courts that had been scattered across downtown. Renzo Piano set a four storey podium holding a full height atrium under a tower of hearing rooms. The tower is glazed and the podium opens to the street, so the public part of a courthouse is the part that can be seen into. Transparency is easy to claim in a court building and hard to build, and this one is testing it.

• Student Learning Centre

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  Completed 2015

  Snøhetta

  A study building for Toronto Metropolitan University on Yonge Street. Snøhetta lifted the entrance to a raised plaza and stacked study floors above it, each one a distinct room rather than a repeated plate. The facade is fritted glass folded into faceted planes that reflect the retail street below. It puts a university's most public room on a commercial strip instead of inside a campus.

• Aga Khan Museum

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  Completed 2014

  Fumihiko Maki

  A museum of Islamic art on a landscaped site in North York. Fumihiko Maki cut a courtyard into the centre of a white granite block and glazed it with patterned screens, so light reaches the galleries filtered rather than direct. The exterior stays closed and angular, with the geometry saved for the courtyard. It brings a building type from another climate to a suburban parkway without imitating it.

• Royal Ontario Museum Crystal

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  Completed 2007

  Daniel Libeskind

  An addition to the museum at Bloor and Avenue Road. Daniel Libeskind pushed five interlocking prismatic volumes out of the historic wing and clad them in aluminium and glass, leaving almost no vertical surface at the street. The galleries inside inherit those slopes, which the museum has worked around since it opened. The addition refuses the alignment of the old wing entirely, which is the position it was built to take.

• Toronto City Hall

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  Completed 1965

  Viljo Revell

  The seat of city government, chosen through an open international competition. Viljo Revell set two curved towers of unequal height around a low domed council chamber, so the plan reads as an eye from above. The outer curves are blank concrete and the inner faces are glazed, which turns the pair into a single enclosure. The square in front was designed with it and does as much civic work as the building.