Every other year, the City of Toronto hosts the Toronto Urban Design Awards to acknowledge the contribution that architects, landscape architects, urban designers, artists, design students and city builders make to the city.
Members of Toronto’s design and development community came together at the Palais Royal on September 10th to commemorate the 2019 winners.
At this year?s event, Mayor John Tory made a surprise announcement of four major city-led design initiatives. ?We?re going to up our game in design,? he said. The initiatives are based on a roundtable that Tory convened with the city?s leading architects and developers.
The first is an ideas competition for missing middle housing?a range of building typologies that the city is starting to encourage. ?A vibrant and affordable city is dependent on multi-unit housing conducive with the kinds of neighbourhoods that residents treasure,? said Tory. He hopes the call will demonstrate how it?s possible to allow gentle density in ways ?that will be very attractive,? both aesthetically and financially.  The second policy, said Tory, is that all major civic projects will go to international open competitions led by the agency CreateTO. The initiative builds on the success of the Etobicoke City Centre revitalization, a competition won by Copenhagen-based Henning Larson with Adamson Associates in 2017. Tory says that the other major civic centres are due for revitalization, and will follow the model taken by Eto...