Behold the lowly, but tall, residential high-rise building. A thousand buildings like this cover the city – a promotional booklet from the period proclaims that Toronto built over 200 buildings of this size in 1968 alone. These buildings are supreme examples of modern planning rationalism. To paraphrase Sprint Canada, they get “the most for the least.” The most people living on a plot of land with the least possible amount of material, that is. The material restrictions dictate a certain severity and optimum deployment, which results in a limited number of stylistic options – all of which have been played out around Toronto over time. One of the standard styles is “Rectilinear Classic”:

Stage 1 –

• Level the site of all that came before;
• Excavate and lay in as much parking as possible;
• Relay a thin layer of grass, and include soon-to-be-smelly stairwells poking out from below;
• Fence the site (optional);
• In the midst of this, situate a tower, slab walls aligning with the parking layout below;
• Extrude stories as required and/or allowed (whichever comes first); with absolute uniformity from bottom to top.

Stage 2 – consider options: How to deal with the balconies? What material for infilling the concrete frame? How should the building hit the ground? (Toronto architects are notoriously good at avoiding the relationship of building to ground.) How to deal with all the exposed concrete?

Rectilinear Classic makes the obvious choices:

• Symmetry, symmetry, symmetry;
• Solid balcony guards (solid appearance = clean appearance);
• Pinch the corners to take the bulk out (i.e., don’t put balconies at the end);
• Reveal the concrete structure by infilling the walls within the structural frame (why pay for covering the structure, and it adds visual interest);

It was within these parameters that the high-rise housing game of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s was played. After 1980, the rules changed again. When is the last time you saw exposed concrete? Looking back from the 21st century, we now know these buildings, with all their faults and their energetic ideals, are now historic in their own right.

Ian Panabaker