Toronto Star

Things are looking up on the Toronto skyline. Though the city remains a bastion of architectural mediocrity, suddenly a handful of major projects by world-leading practitioners, some of them local, is underway. If it's true that Toronto is in the midst of a cultural renaissance, 2005 may be remembered as the year it got going in earnest. Though much of the city's new institutional infrastructure remains under construction, some facilities will open during the next 12 months. Most notably, the first phase of the Royal Ontario Museum's remake will be unveiled in December: The Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin Crystal won't be ready, but the freshly renovated east and west wings will be. With decades of additions and "improvements" finally removed, these two wings will be all but unrecognizable. Those enormous windows, long blocked up, will be reincorporated and visitors will again enjoy end-to-end vistas not visible for a generation or two.