Why can’t this city, with such extraordinary possibilities for rich human encounters, with everything from parading nudists, hip-swinging transvestites, and burka-wearing women do something more for its physical environment? What I would love to see would be a great bit of public architecture. But both Toronto’s city hall and its research library are the kinds of sterile, person-hating, back turning, aloof architecture that it makes good sense to hate. Why not take a vast centrally-located site and build something grand and truly beautiful? When was the last time Toronto, (or any other city for that matter) built a grand masonry arch to frame a window? Why not say no to the glass curtain wall, no doubt the most popular and most ugly architectural innovation of the last century?
It’s so sad to walk down Avenue Road and see old apartment buildings that have beautiful deco detailing, copper doors, and even bits of relief sculpture, all neglected because traffic has to move so fast there that all sense of pedestrian movement, of the deeply human aspect of architecture is gone? The city is a living organism, indeed one of the greatest human inventions of all time, but one that is constantly threatened by people’s hatred of each other and of difference.
The great sadness in Toronto is that it is so evident that the city could do so much better!
Charles Durning Carroll 
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