Something interesting about arctic construction: it strongly resembles that of the metropole. Some climactic adaptation, but Nuuk, Murmansk, Fairbanks, and Yellowknife are all very different. It suggests that mainland construction differences are also driven more by socioeconomics than geography.

and that's *with* spiral staircases, and without sprinklers.

Interesting floor plan that shows what mitigations are possible that are not a second stair or sprinklers (neither of which are common in new apartment buildings in France). The lower floors have a short double-loaded corridor with five units of up to 4BR, which I... divisare.com/projects/548...

I've received many messages about this over the last two weeks — people still read, reference, and link to these stories WRITTEN BY REAL REPORTERS who knew their cities better than anyone else. I figured a fix might have been delayed due to holiday breaks but this needs to be remedied immediately!

Late last year, I shared some of my thoughts on the best buildings of 2025 with the Toronto Star. Nice to see a few of my picks make the cut:

One thing I wrote about here is how technology has made buses *way* more convenient while techno-futurists were obsessed with flying taxis and self-driving cars.

also bored. here's the canadian cities (from apta) vancouver = 0.507 calgary = 0.410 victoria = 0.278 edmonton = 0.264 winnipeg = 0.259 have to dig around for more ridership data for these two given all the agencies in the metro area, but they're at least this much: toronto >0.539 montreal >0.424

single stair isn't deregulation. neither is eliminating parking minimums. hell the largest single stair building in the world is 97 single stair conditions at karl-marx-hof, built by red vienna reason.com/2025/12/29/t...

ICE raids appear to be 100% responsible for the current housing crunch in south Texas. Indeed, they have brought residential construction to an end.

Yeah, as I've been saying, we overcompensated because the media ran with the stupid 'GDP per capita' and 'immigrants hurt housing' framing. This is long-run damage to the economy by short-term thinking, feeding xenophobia, and helping to further destroy Canada's world class universities.

TORONTO! Save the date. We'll be coming to what is arguably the birthplace of the war on cars for a live show on February 5th, 2026. Patreoners will get first dibs on tickets. Stay tuned for more details! Doug Ford will not be our special guest. www.patreon.com/c/thewaronca...

wow this is incredibly bleak

I wrote a piece for @archpaper.com about 18F, the National Design Studio, and the insidiousness of “rebranding” government services instead of improving them. Thanks to my editors for letting me use the phrase “tread on me daddy” in an architecture publication 🫡 www.archpaper.com/2025/12/nati...

Coming up at the @ccaconversations.bsky.social in Montreal: a closer look at Culture Lab, the symposium held in the back of a club in Toronto, from 1991 to 1994. That club was: The Rivoli.

Registration is now open for my upcoming Heritage Ottawa lecture on #OttawaBrutalism. (link below) Thu Dec 18 2025 @ 7:00pm Beechwood National Memorial Centre, Sacred Space Room, 280 Beechwood Avenue, Ottawa

One of Canada’s great bldns (despite de-brutalizing reno) - exposed aggregate should be the symbol of Canada. This is my weird cause I will quietly push until I fade into obscurity.

“Like its counterparts in Toronto, Vancouver, London, Lisbon, Dubai and Dushanbe, Houston’s new Ismaili Center proudly conveys both cultural specificity and cosmopolitanism,” writes @novakovicto.bsky.social. www.azuremagazine.com/article/hous...

Line 6 late evening maintenance replacement bus is scheduled for a 34 min runtime, about 26% faster than the train (46 mins). Kinda bad. In reality, the replacement bus can make the trip in ~24 mins, about 54% faster than the on-street runtime I experienced on the train (~53 mins). Really bad.

Legendary architect Frank Gehry has passed away at the age of 96. In tribute, we revisit a 2003 profile by Adele Freedman.

Isabella St. A perfectly good apt bldn empty, people displaced & being demolished all because so much of Toronto is off limits & forced here. Aka house neighbourhoods. Such a shame. Such waste. And the shame of every elected official here. Shame of Ford for not pushing reforms. All the same.

A few months ago @thelocal.to got a promising pitch from a writer with bylines in whole bunch of reputable publications—The Cut, The Guardian, Dwell, Architectural Digest, etc. Then I started investigating. Here's a story about fabulists in journalism's AI slop era. thelocal.to/investigatin...

Almost everywhere in the City of Toronto has fewer people that it did 50 years ago

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...