The Globe and Mail

Nobody in Toronto can design a tall building with a bottom that works. If I've heard this complaint once, I've heard it a dozen times. It's not hard to figure out how such criticism started making the rounds. In Toronto's newest crop of residential skyscrapers, more than a few have shafts that are acceptably artistic, but ground floors that are dull and dutiful, and sometimes downright ugly. The lobbies are measly, embellished (if at all) by tropicals in various states of dilapidation -- meaning the transition between apartment and outside world, which should be elegant, is unpleasant, abrupt.