The Globe and Mail

In last week's column, which had to do with a public discussion about improving Toronto's looks, I offhandedly proposed the Toronto-Dominion Centre as a standard by which to measure our efforts at beautification. I was repeating, of course, what I have long believed: that architect Mies van der Rohe's original group of bank and office buildings at the corner of King Street West and Bay Street is a miracle of urban design -- sophisticated, creative, honest, supremely intelligent. But I made a mistake in the column. Not by celebrating the TD Centre, which is nothing less than a masterpiece, but by assuming I could just drop the name without a word about why it is one.