The Globe and Mail

Although I didn't know what "utopia" meant when I was seven or eight years old, I think my version of it for Toronto then would have been a row of Mies van der Rohe buildings -- like the black-beamed, bronze-windowed, brooding and geometrically perfect TD Centre -- stretching into the hazy distance. Something about them stirred the proto-nerd in my soul: Remote and untouchable on their raised, windswept plaza, the controlled square of lawn between the towers both acknowledged nature while proving that we, the frail humans, had become its overlord. During downtown walks with my mother after my biweekly allergy shot, I'd often ask her to bring me to stare at them, or the almost-completed CN Tower, and she'd happily oblige, being an architecture fan herself, albeit for the frills and curlicues of Victorian Toronto.