The Globe and Mail

Sapphire Tower, the newest residential skyscraper in downtown Toronto by celebrity developer Harry Stinson, is not a building for the faint of heart, style-wise. You will need a certain, big-city attitude to live in a gleaming, blue-glass cloud-puncher 80-plus storeys tall. (You have until 2007, its expected date of completion, to get the appropriate attitude together.) Nor should anyone expect such a bossy building to fit in quietly among the serious, conservatively tailored office towers in its Financial District neighbourhood. In contrast to those Miesian corporate headquarters and the tall, retiring Modernist condo blocks going up around town -- some of them beautiful indeed -- Sapphire promises to be a glitzy, got-rocks kind of dame, and a welcome addition to the urban mix for that reason alone. (I love Greta Garbo, but who would want to live in a world of all Garbo and no Mae West?)