As architects, we must pay careful attention to, listen to, and observe how our many culturally and ethnically-diverse communities are contributing to the development of our surroundings. Our urban conditions and the associated architectural manifestations are developing in ways that are informal and often unplanned. If designers fail to consider these changes, then we will have missed valuable opportunities to contribute to the spatial qualities of our communities. The current situation of the suburban strip malls for example, represents a type of space where complex socialization patterns occur across various socio-economic segments of the population that requires considered designed solutions. Commerce, religion, education, and public spaces are being developed, occupied and understood in these mall territories that will continue to arrange themselves as something distinctly heterogeneous and Canadian. Our challenge is to continue to facilitate the evolution of these cosmopolitan opportunities in our cities and ensure that design opportunities flourish as social trends evolve across cultures and throughout Canada. It is difficult to plan for elements of our city that are appropriated and mutated by our various populations. Nonetheless, the strength of Toronto’s character resides in these multiple readings being developed by our many ethnic communities, hence Toronto’s reading as Multipli-city.

My graduate seminar this year investigates the theme "Architecture and Utopia." Every week we gather in a fluorescent-washed room, under a cheap suspended ceiling, on mismatched chairs, and discuss big urban dreams, the visions of sprawling hope. Cities transformed into vast Edenic gardens, with sweeping throughways and radial residential blocks as far as the eye can see. Cities razed and rebuilt in futuristic layers, with floating railways stations and razored, hundred-story office towers. Dreamy cities, with snaking flaneur-friendly walkways and arresting juxtaposed street-culture. We read Le Corbusier, Sant'Elia, Benjamin. We entertain visions, images, pictures. We sit under the harsh electrified gas, our heads bent together, a dozen of us, architects and philosophers, probing to the logic of dreams.

Outside, with these north-facing windows, there is only the watery winter light of Toronto. The vista is bleak, a scene of nothingness. A parking lot. A snow-covered field where a stadium used to be. To the left, a small daycare centre and playground. Straight ahead, across Bloor Street, the banal concrete brutalism of the OISE building, one of those edifices apparently constructed to convey hatred for the street on which it sits. You must sidle down its edge even to get in. It could be a courthouse or security-conscious consulate. Next to it, a windswept and pointless parkette, a red stone wall blocking any decent view of a private club.

Inside the room, we look at pretty pictures and discuss big ideas. Tales of Paris, Milan, New York, Shanghai. We try not to look out the window, but it's hard, not least because someone has permanently removed the curtains from the windows, something we discovered only when we attempted to screen "The Fountainhead" in class. The dim light, those beige and grey structures under colourless sky, undid that dream.

Is it just us, or has the quality of the city's street name signs been steadily declining over the past few years? While the latest variety of black and white sign bears a superficial similarity to the signs of old (i.e. lozenge shaped with a little black acorn on top) the resemblance pretty much stops there. The new signs are much bigger and flatter than they need to be, and look like they are made out of molded plastic, having none of the graceful extruded depth of their metal predecessors. Gone are the embossed, crafted letters that spell out the street name; instead the letterforms look as though they’ve been simply laser printed on. And in some cases, as this photo shows, two signs have been rudely joined together in a manner that makes it look like the middle section has been sliced out by a chainsaw.

What’s behind the switch? Cost savings no doubt, a decision by some mega-city accounting functionary to save a few dollars out of the yearly operating budget. Toronto Life’s Urban Decoder columnist might be able to tell us more, but as far as we’re concerned these signs look like fakes, insubstantial imposters that would be more at home in a theme park. Downgrading such a ubiquitous, integral part of the city’s character was an uninspired, wrong-headed move, as it cheapens the look of our fine city at a time when there are so many other things that are successfully bringing up the tone.

We’re three years away from the grand (re)opening of the transformed Art Gallery of Ontario, and one could reasonably ask what New York’s Museum of Modern Art could teach us even from this chronological distance. Seizing the occasion of MoMA’s reopening in January after an $800-million plus expansion seemed an opportune time for our Board of Trustees to go and experience from the inside this great relaunching of the world’s greatest museum of modern art.

The new MoMA is really the first great building since 9/11, and being there we had a very real sense that the city is being reborn, that it is in the midst of a spiritual reawakening and great things are still possible.

During and after our visit, what struck me was the realization, in very passionate terms, that it isn’t just a matter of building a museum. It’s building a city. We’re not just building these rooms for art but also adding something to the fabric of the civic space – the space where you live, the space you care about.

There are special characteristics about the MoMA’s architecture -- visibility into the street, the relationship from one room to another and how you walk through the spaces, the focus on the experience of art. In many ways that’s what we want to do at the AGO. We want to create great experiences with art, and this dynamic relationship with the street. We want to create great viewing rooms and also great meeting places where people can gather and exchange their experiences about what they’ve seen.

That’s the challenge we face with Transformation AGO -- how to create an art museum that anticipates what you want an art museum to be. And that’s what architect Frank Gehry is working on with our building. Watching our volunteer board gravitate around those issues as they themselves were experiencing the new MoMA was exciting. Thinking about how Transformation AGO is going to function and what it’s actually going to do for the city -- MoMA helped bring that experience alive.

Image © Gehry International Architects, Inc.