The Toronto Film Festival is also full of these specific, indelible memories. How can I forget the 1990 festival when I sat with a bunch of hardy cinephiles and literally camped out at the Bloor Cinema for ten days. We saw five films or so a day, often ate lunch in our seats, wallowing in the amazing Jean-Luc Godard retrospective.

I Love the Stuff at the ROM
Dinosaurs and diamonds, shale and silk, the smallest this, the biggest that, the rarest of; I overlooked a lot of the world before I started to work at the ROM. It usually happens at lunch, or during a coffee break, when I’m walking through a gallery and something catches my eye. Who knew I was interested in bats, could find a beetle amazing or a pottery chip remarkable? Apparently, there are over six million objects in the ROM’s collection so I haven’t seen everything yet.

Read the stone carvings on either side of the ROM’s main doors and it sounds very proper: “The record of nature through countless ages” and “The arts of man through all the years.” The town’s leading citizens were determined to bring the wonders of the world to Toronto and had faith that Toronto would be the better for it.

I think these inquisitive, public-spirited museum builders had me in mind. What I noticed because it was inside the museum is what I see everywhere now. It’s as if someone told me all these things were important and I’ve finally heard them. I’m caring about the unexpected and often curious beauty of the world, again, just like I did when I was young.

The "Work, Office, Meditation, Base" or WOMB project we developed a few years ago can serve as a model for a re-imagined 21st. Century Toronto. In an age where our impact on the planet must be constrained, Minimalism is more than just a stylistic counterpoint to recent architectural fashions. A minimal, polyvalent city would retain its social significance while providing business and leisure opportunities. In fact, it would do everything our city does now - but do it better. It would combine new, energy efficient transportation technologies with the altered patterns of use Internet based convergence is beginning to foster.

The City on a Lake
Toronto today is a microcosm of Canada: a young, evolving cultural formation; heterogeneous, diverse, complex, open, and democratic. The city is bounded by Lake Ontario, and two rivers - the Humber River and the Don River. Toronto’s major nineteenth century institutions – including Old City Hall, the Connaught Building, the Grange– are all sited in green space “voids” and oriented to face south to the lake. A system of expressways ---Highway 427, the Gardiner Expressway, the Don Valley Expressway, and Highway 401-the Macdonald-Cartier Trans-Canada Highway---define another framework that orders the city.

Grid: A Veneer of Order, and the Ordinary
Toronto has been criticized for appearing boring. The innate geography of the city is a rising terrain which contains valleys, ravines and watersheds carved through the landscape. In 1788, Gunther Mann devised a gridiron plan to organize the city, leaving a legacy of conservative order, a veneer over the deeper, more complex, more wild and organic foundation of the city. Today’s supergrid of arterial streets - mostly north and south, east and west – is interwoven with zones of institutional, commercial, and residential uses. Many of these zones have evolved into ethnic neighbourhoods – such as Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy - embedded with the richness of culture and individuality. To know the city, like the ravines and valleys, you have to go deeper, beneath the surface of its order, into the neighborhoods and the streets.

A Matrix for Creativity and Diversity
Toronto’s urban fabric – the supergrid - is directly connected to the city’s ability to evolve into a culturally and ethnically diverse centre. It acts as a matrix, or crucible, for individuality, creativity, innovation and invention. In Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, a team led by Professor Meric Gertler at the University of Toronto analyzed Canadian cities adapting the methodologies used for U.S. cities. The results indicated that Toronto ranks very high on the three indices---the Talent index, accounting for the number of people with post-secondary education; the Bohemian index, accounting for the number of artists, designers, musicians, architects, etc. in the urban population; and the Mosaic index, accounting for the number of people who were born somewhere else. According to the DIAC Design Industry Study issued in 2004, Toronto has the largest design workforce in Canada, and the third largest design workforce in North America after New York and Boston.

photo credit: Robert Hill