The Canadian city has been transformed by daring contemporary architecture and the rise of 'condo towers', writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
It's really quite remarkable how cities change. I hadn't been to Toronto since I was a student, and last month, walking around the city, it dawned on me that most of the high-rise buildings dotted in and around its downtown area didn't exist the last time I was there.
It was as if it had become a different place.
Construction of the CN Tower in 1976, now long-established as the icon of Canada's largest city, hadn't even started then. But its revolving restaurant, 351m (1,151ft) above ground level, provides an unrivalled overview of Toronto's skyline and the carpet of low-rise sprawl spreading out towards the horizon.
There were some familiar landmarks, such as Mies van der Rohe's Toronto Dominion Centre - a cluster of dark brooding towers dating from 1969. Their delta manganese bronze finish is exactly the same as on his Seagram building in New York, the Federal Center in Chicago and Scott Tallon Walker's Bank of Ireland in Baggot Street, Dublin.
More remarkable is Toronto City Hall, which was designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell following an international competition held as long ago as 1958. Rising from a rectangular base, its two curved concrete and glass towers - mildly Brutalist in style - are 20 and 27 storeys high, cupping a circular council chamber between them.
In front is a huge plaza, with fountains and a Henry Moore bronze as centrepieces, surrounded by an elevated walkway (now closed).
A very popular place for sitting out on sunny days, it is flanked to the east by the old city hall, a dark sandstone building dating from 1899, which now functions as the city's courthouse.
The new city hall, which many in Toronto thought was "too modern" when it was finished in 1965, is one of those 20th century buildings that have stood the test of time - like Michael Scott's even earlier Busáras in Dublin. The only disappointing element is its rather squat entrance, which seems like a hole in the wall.
Nearby on Yonge Street is the vast Eaton Centre, the largest shopping mall in eastern Canada. Occupying almost three city blocks, its soaring glass-vaulted multi-level interior was clearly inspired by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. In winter, it provides a warm space for shopping, insulated from the bitterly cold weather.
Inevitably, perhaps, Daniel Libeskind has thrown shapes in Toronto - just as he is about to do in Dublin's Grand Canal Docks. Working with local architects Bregman and Hamann, he has just completed a major extension to the Royal Ontario Museum - the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, called after its major donor, a Chinese-Jamaican tycoon.
In Libeskind's trademark deconstructivist style, the new extension replaces an earlier one done in 1984. All jagged and streaked, it seems to burst out of the original neo-Romanesque building - Canada's largest museum - aiming to create "a landscape of desire inviting people to come in", according to museum director William Thorsell.
Work is also well advanced on a major remodelling of the Art Gallery of Ontario by another international starchitect, Frank Gehry, of Bilbao Guggenheim fame. To be clad in titanium - blue, this time - the new building is replacing a very dated post-modern extension, completed as recently as 1992, in a $500 million (€357 million) project.
British "blobby architect" Will Alsop has also made his mark on Toronto with a two-storey box sitting on top of angular coloured concrete columns. Housing the Sharp Centre for Design at the city's College of Art, it was dubbed the "floating shoebox" on completion in 2004 and won an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Santiago Calatrava flew in to design the dramatic Allen Lambert Galleria at Brookfield Place, an office complex in the financial district. Super-cool Norman Foster has also been there, to do the Leslie L Dan Pharmacy Building at the University of Toronto, while Behnisch and Behnisch produced its Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research.
Oddly enough, it fell to local architects Diamond and Schmitt to design the city's new opera house, the Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre, which opened last year. With a glazed screen in front, its five-tiered auditorium seats 2,000, but the building is quite modest and understated by comparison with the Sydney Opera House.
The most remarkable change in Toronto is the appearance of numerous "condo towers" on the skyline. Thirty years ago, almost nobody lived in the inner city. But like Dublin, its population has been boosted by the influx of young professionals and others who prefer apartments downtown than life in the far-flung suburbs.
The latest high-rise condominiums in Toronto have a whiff of Vancouver about them - tall slender towers with six to eight generously proportioned flats per floor. And indeed, some have been designed by Vancouver architect James Cheng, whose most ambitious scheme is the 61-storey Shangri-La Tower, near the opera house.
Much hope is invested in developing the city's waterfront on Lake Ontario, which is currently severed from downtown by the hideous Gardiner Expressway - elevated on stilts as if to compound the cleavage it has caused. This traffic-choked motorway, known to critics as "The Mistake by the Lake", will have to be put underground.
Toronto Waterfront, billed as "the largest urban redevelopment project in North America", involves transforming a 800-hectare (1,920-acre) redundant industrial zone into a place with "exceptional parks, cultural destinations, sustainable new communities and a strong employment sector [ that will] become Toronto's signature to the world".
Within it, right at the end of Bathurst Street, is Ireland Park, which was officially opened by President Mary McAleese on June 21st last. It is dedicated to remember the generosity of the people of Toronto - then with a population of just over 20,000 - towards some 38,000 refugees from the Great Famine in the very black year of 1847.
Designed by architect Jonathan Kearns, the tiny park "packs a preternatural punch", according to the Toronto Star. Its "dark and rugged" Kilkenny limestone wall "in slabs, blocks and as large chunks seemingly ripped out of the ground and transplanted here" - and Rowan Gillespie's emaciated figures, as on Custom House Quay.
"The result is a remarkable landscape-within-a-landscape.
"Surrounded by the ruins of Toronto's industrial past and the hopes of its waterfront future, Ireland Park straddles a number of worlds.
"Amid the ear-piercing din of the Island Airport ... and the traffic of the harbour, the sudden advent of sacred space is even more surprising."
At present, the park is dominated by a decaying concrete malting tower in a relatively obscure and unsignposted location, but this will change. In the week we were in Toronto, the CN Tower was pipped for the title of "world's tallest structure" by the Burj Tower in Dubai, which will ultimately surpass its height by at least 200m (660ft).
