The Globe and Mail

Cities around the world are taking turns producing a new generation of buildings that frame ballet and opera, expressions of art honed and refined from one century to the next. Built templates exist for those institutions. But, how to design for ways of thinking that never even existed five years ago -- where agents of extreme intelligence have cut themselves loose from conventional thinking? Here's where architecture can get interesting. The Terence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (CCBR) at the University of Toronto is intelligent, unconventional architecture designed through a strong collaboration between local Toronto architects and German gurus of high-technology design. Dedicated to the human genome project, the centre has been invested with light and life-sustaining textures; its bamboo garden can reignite the human spirit on any bitterly cold winter day. With its completion, the identity of Toronto as a thinking place of urbanity is confirmed all over again.