CITYSPACE: PUG AWARDS: THE CITY SPEAKS

Putting buildings in the paws of the people: to name a developer responsible for the most despised structure is part of the fun

LISA ROCHON Saturday, May 31, 2008

In this game, everybody gets to be judge and style arbiter. Trust your eyes, trust your gut and answer the question: Do you love it or hate it? The fourth annual online Pug Awards, the people's choice for good and bad new architecture in Toronto, has gained enough credibility and votes that it will probably spread to Vancouver next year. The goal is to stir the pot about architecture, and that's a laudable mission.

Along the way, there will be some soul-searching and startling revelations. And, yes, some developers and architects are going to get hurt.

Two decades ago, it was possible to declare that Toronto (and the rest of Canada), architecturally speaking, was in near-total retreat. But architecture of late has taken on a new vitality and confidence, with the work of Canadian architects making it to front covers of major American design journals and winning prestigious international prizes.

So far, the 2008 Pug Awards have attracted about 50,000 online votes for a variety of new buildings.M

ost prominent among the candidates is, of course, the gargantuan expression of Daniel Libeskind's ego - and shoddily built, at that - otherwise known as the $135-million Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum.

And there is the metastasizing incidence of condominiums. Many are heartbreakingly banal, blinkered to the potential of their sites, with developers failing to rise to the exquisite scale and texture of Yorkville or the muscularity of a brick warehouse in the city's west end. What results is the Hazelton Hotel by Page + Steele, a development as exciting as a limp handshake, and the Argyle Authentic Lofts.

Yes, it is wonderful that the Edwardian bakery with art deco flourishes survived demolition, but, given the bargain-basement landscaping and middling penthouse, Core Architects found little of interest to say about the 21st century. Thankfully, there are a few moments of urban intelligence breaking free from the muck. For a dynamic penthouse of floating planes and quality materials see Core Architect's mid-rise condos at 20 Stewart for Freed Developments.

Or there's Spire, a tight, glass-on-glass tower by Architects Alliance that fully assumes its site in Toronto's downtown. For Broadview Lofts, Turner Fleischer Architects specified black window mullions and distinctive penthouses to cut a dramatic conversion and addition to an early 19th-century United Drugs factory. One City Hall Place, a mid-rise condominium by Hariri Pontarini Architects, is a gracious and finely tuned intervention located behind the back door of City Hall.

Can you really evaluate architecture by simply affixing a heart to a dinky-sized pic of a building? Or slamming a skull-and-crossbones onto it? The projects are described on the Pug website by way of three images, and there's nothing else to help voters with issues of context, zoning, program, feats of engineering, craft or materials. What of the way that architecture worthy of human beings - to borrow from German social philosopher Theodor Adorno - thinks better of men, women and children than they actually are? Is it right to debate the latest style offerings of condominium developers when Martin Heidegger would have preferred that we dig down to the fundamentals of how we dwell?

Maybe the simplistic rite of voting on the Web is ridiculous and unfair, but, curiously, the public and the experts think in tandem. "What I've learned from this process is that taking a very simple voting process, where you say yes or no - thumbs up or thumbs down - matches the way that a panel of experts would vote," says developer Gary Berman, co-founder of the Pug Awards, along with interior designer Anna Simone.

Past winners of the Pugs have typically been recipients of Ontario Association of Architects awards or, indeed, Governor-General Medals of Architecture. Faced with images - exterior elevations, mostly - the individual is asked to reduce the debate to the aesthetics of architecture. Or maybe this is to elevate architecture to its loftiest aspirations. After all, there is no great architecture without art.

The other bit of fun, I guess, is naming the perpetrators of the horrible work, although this smacks of Robespierre's reign of terror. To name a developer responsible for the year's worst, most despised building in the city is to effectively sentence the builder to the guillotine. And that's never pleasant. (The accused usually don't show up at the awards ceremony.) But consider the possibilities: The same developer with a new architect could be eventually lauded by the public.

To pressure, to debate, to write, to award - all of these measures are what's required if we want to end the cycle of designed banality in Toronto.

And, without a doubt, educating kids on how to demand more from their city is a crucial project. For its potential to engage a new generation of thinking urbanists, I personally find the Pug Ed design program to be particularly inspired. About 40 inner-city students from Jesse Ketchum Public School and Queen Alexandra Senior Public School enrolled this spring in the after-school program.

The Grade 8 students meet after school to discuss design and architecture and listen up to what some of the design professionals - architects, landscape architects, developers and city councillors - have to say about what it takes to ennoble a city through inspired urbanism.

When I attended one of the sessions a couple weeks ago, students, first- and second-generation immigrants to Canada, sat bolt upright while landscape architect Janet Rosenberg presented a PowerPoint presentation with her usual passion to the audience. It was 4 p.m., the students had already spent a day in school, but their questions at the end of Ms. Rosenberg's presentation were articulate, thoughtful and sophisticated.

This week, the students are completing their designs for an in-class competition in response to a particular site in Toronto. Educational bursaries worth $4,000 for the winner and $2,000 for the runner-up will be presented at the June 4 closing ceremony.

And there's nothing to debate about the brilliance of that.

For more information on the Pug Awards and how to vote, click here:

Vote, vote, vote

To qualify for a Pug Award, buildings must have been completed last year, be located in the former City of Toronto - though this will likely expand to the Greater Toronto Area in the future - and have an area greater than 50,000 square feet. The Gardiner Museum, by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, which won last year as best institutional-commercial building, measured less than that, so some exceptions to the rule are allowed.

Today is the last day to vote before final decisions are released with considerable fanfare at the June 4 evening event at the Gardiner Museum for Ceramic Arts.

New this year, the 91-centimetre Pug Cup. The awards have arrived.