Architecture of Toronto

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The architecture of Toronto is an eclectic combination of architectural styles, ranging from 19th century Georgian architecture to 21st century postmodern architecture and beyond.

Initially, the city was on the periphery of the architectural world, embracing styles and ideas developed in Europe and the United States with only limited local variation.

However, a few unique styles of architecture have emerged from Toronto, such as the bay and gable style house and the Annex style house.

Toronto's older buildings are influenced by the city's history and culture. Most of the city's older buildings adopted designs found in other areas of the British Empire, such as Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, and various revival-styled designs that were popular during the 19th and early 20th century.

In the years following World War II, the city experienced massive growth and adopted a number of modernist and postmodernist architectural styles, including the International Style and the towers in the park concept. With the adoption of the Greenbelt throughout the Greater Toronto Area in 2005, the region has experienced a large condo boom amid the Canadian property bubble with many designs adopting neomodern styles.

Since the end of World War II, many prominent architects have done work in the city, including Toronto native Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster, Will Alsop, I. M. Pei, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Reflecting this eclectic combination of architecture, Lawrence Richards, a member of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto, has said "Toronto is a new, brash, rag-tag place—a big mix of periods and styles."^[1]

The growth of the city is influenced by the geography of the city, most notably the Toronto ravine system and the Greenbelt, a permanently protected area of green space, farmland, forests, wetlands, and watersheds within the Golden Horseshoe.

The natural geography of the city also provided builders with a variety of resources to build from. The most abundant raw material was the shale layer underlying the city, as well as the abundance of clay, making brick an especially inexpensive and available material, and resulting in many of the city's buildings being built from brick.