My curatorial debut! Building Value(s) was staged at @azuremagazine.bsky.social's Human/Nature conference in late October. A meditation on demolition, preservation and the value of our buildings — whether expressed in carbon and collective memory.

Brilliant representation by Giaimo of the embodied carbon wasted in the demolition of perfectly good buildings in Toronto to build bigger buildings. A thousand houses worth of carbon. @azuremagazine.bsky.social #human/nature

I love architecture exhibition text. It really helps the general public understand things.

And at @thelocal.to, here in Toronto, we have one, too! A new, part-time, flexible fellowship for Black and/or Indigenous journalists thelocal.to/early-career...

I'm not sayin' that Jays game ran too long or anything, I'm just sayin', the fans at the Toronto watch party got to ride home on the newly opened Eglinton Crosstown LRT

Attention design teams! Help us turn this parking lot into a new urban park. The City of Toronto has launched an international design competition for a new park in Liberty Village. Details at tinyurl.com/5xzrwh6p

“In Toronto, fans get to the game the way God intended: on mass transit that drops you off right at the ballpark, because the communal experience of professional sports should include the ride there”

Strange tags on raided apartments, a slumlord speculator under water with the bank & eviction drives in a gentrifying neighborhood. @rebeccaburns.bsky.social investigates how tenants were systematically targeted during September's military-style raid of a Chicago apartment building @inthesetimes.com

John Maynard Keynes was talking about money when he said "In the long run, we are all dead.” but I think the same thing applies to carbon emissions. lloydalter.substack.com/p/now-emissi...

Conservatives want to pitch the White House demolition as YIMBY. This is a bad-faith brain-dead take. You don't want expansive historic reviews for building new homes. You do want expansive historic reviews for *demolishing the White House.* www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

tatiana bilbao's 10-story twinned point access block social housing in lyon - allows for homes from 1-4 bedrooms. 100% illegal in every part of the US www.archdaily.com/1034632/lyon...

“In the open dining hall and refectory, the simple wood cladding and carefully proportioned window openings create an energetic yet calming ambiance, while the tall, slanted ceiling fosters an almost cathedral-like setting.”

"Social media regulation took far too long to arrive, and even then, it came in an imperfect form. But governments don’t appear ready to grapple with the reality that chatbots and image and video generators are speedrunning the harms caused by social media."

Windowless bedrooms are Not Good but merely banning them in the code doesn’t fix the reason they are proliferating in the first place and if more consequential systemic problems aren’t fixed we’ll just end up with more closets, bigger bathrooms, and fewer beds.

World Series, Stadium Edition: Rogers Centre vs. Dodger Stadium 🤔

In the woods north of Toronto, a barn for the 21st century. My @azuremagazine.bsky.social cover story on Koffler Scientific Reserve by Montgomery Sisam Architects. www.azuremagazine.com/article/koff...

"The clergy stood apart, separated by railings, and the people were spectators. Vatican II changed that. It asked us to create spaces where people could participate, where the sacred could be shared." Douglas Cardinal in conversation with Hanls Ulbrich Obrist. theworldaround.org/insights/dou...

Its a thing that Safe Parkside, volunteer advocacy group, had to file the $FIO request for these numbers. The city itself should have been using them in the fight with Ford.

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

i hope we find out what architects and engineers are on these projects so they can be disqualified for projects in the future

Exciting and FREE panel discussion on REFORMING PROCUREMENT next Tues, Oct 14 at 12pm. Hosted by @tosoarch.bsky.social, moderated by @novakovicto.bsky.social, it features reps from New York, Montréal, & Edmonton, all cities with a track record of procuring design excellence.

The Venn diagram of urban density and average household GHG emissions is pretty much a circle. Interesting study on “Mapping household GHG emissions in the Greater Golden Horseshoe” from the University of Toronto School of Cities schoolofcities.utoronto.ca/mapping-hous...

“The iPhone, which has flattened our lives, is the essence of minimal modernism. But the social equity somehow did not follow.”

Reading Impossible Toronto, on how Toronto’s side streets can be redeveloped with a denser, more European form. Applicable really to almost anywhere in North America though. Free here: impossibletoronto.ca

Like many cities, Madrid comfortably integrates restaurants/cafes into public space. Why not in North America? I could be wrong but 2 ideas. 1) good public spaces are scarce so we treat them kind of religiously. 2) how would duty of care and liability be divided between the city and the restaurant?

An @azuremagazine.bsky.social tribute to one of my heroes, Kongjian Yu, who I was lucky to spend a couple of hours with last year.

The Great Resegregation in housing www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/r...

Many of our land use / building codes are rooted in exclusion + prejudice, even if they are facially anodyne and widely accepted as common sense today Case in point: early 1900 fire safety reforms were primarily designed to ⬆️ the cost of tenements / MF apts (old and new) to reduce immigration

Dense apartment buildings were a key ingredient of Toronto urban *and* suburban affordability. Today, 1 million people live in more than 2,000 mid-century towers throughout the Greater Toronto Area, more than any other city in North America. Toronto is unique for this reason.

For better or worse, architecture media (like housing photography) shape our understanding of shelter—of who gets it and who doesn’t, how space and aesthetics figure, and why wealth and power matter.

Assembled in 17 days using panelized mass timber, sourced from Ontario. Shaped around the church to create a courtyard at the back. Twenty-five new homes.

"Although the homes are configured as compact micro-units, the lack of double-loaded interior corridors allows every suite to be a dual aspect unit — a rarity, unfortunately, for North American apartments — with natural light coming in from two sides."

check out our recent project mapping street space allocation in Toronto we find that more than 80% of transportation infrastructure in Toronto is designed for cars, far more than how people actually travel w/ @lanrickbennett.bsky.social & Mia Wang schoolofcities.github.io/who-are-stre...

Forget the puns: public toilets matter. Toronto is getting them wrong. The city could miss a huge opportunity to boost its own design culture. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

. @novakovicto.bsky.social rounds up the Aga Khan Awards: www.azuremagazine.com/article/the-...

Dally in the Alley in #Detroit was awesome! A sea of people of all ages, colors, genders. So much diversity and creativity! Loved it. Detroit is wonderful. Don’t let ANYONE tell you any different.

This is possible. Also Rail Deck, in retrospect, was vaporware and a distraction from the actual public works that the city should’ve been building in boom times.

Funnily enough this class (which I took on a lark) got me into urbanism. For the final paper I wrote about establishing a Canadian ministry of cities, after reading a @brenttoderian.bsky.social editorial on the issue. Doing research, I got into @urbantoronto.bsky.social, which became my first job!

I was never a big hockey fan, but I had Ken Dryden as a professor at McGill in Canadian Studies. We talked about citizenship and patriotism, and what all of that means. One day, I put up my hand in class. I told him I was Canadian, voted in every election, and considered myself civically engaged. 1/

Such a responsible + humble critique: @hawthorne.bsky.social engages with the V&A Storehouse, which has won nearly universally glowing reviews from architecture critics, by engaging with *curators'* reservations — a great example of the value of *rdg outside your immediate field*! :)

Honoured to share the stage with Toronto's hottest urbanist tonight.

Tonight: Tony Price aka MAXIMUM EXPOSURE is throwing a little listening party in celebration of his sonic eulogy for the Ontario Science Centre. Yours truly will be in conversation with people far more qualified and interesting to talk about the space’s history and future(s).

Fascinated to learn (via Richard Harris, "Unplanned Suburbs") that Jewish people were the largest non-British-Isles-origin population in Toronto in the first half of the 20th century (about 7%).

“Just outside the Bosnian town of Gradačac, the House for Five Women is immediately distinguished by the vividly textured patchwork of bold colours that adorns its second-storey facade,” writes @novakovicto.bsky.social.

Architecture critics “increasingly write about places we never experience, and I wonder how much good it does. After speaking to Zimonjić, Burkhart and Smajlović, I realize I’ve only scratched the surface.” — @novakovicto.bsky.social

We praise “culturally responsive” design, even when we know almost nothing about the cultures it’s responding to. Lately, I’ve started to think of architectural criticism as its own type of diaspora. In @azuremagazine.bsky.social, one of my more intimate pieces: www.azuremagazine.com/article/hous...

I’ll be moderating a panel of very smart people on the past, present, and future(s) of Raymond Moriyama’s Ontario Science Centre on September 4th. The impetus for the event is Tony Price’s recently released “Requiem for the Science Centre” album—gonna be fun.

Smallness as in human scale and velocity should be a goal in mobility and urban design.

Tokyo. The world’s biggest city is profoundly shaped by smallness.