The Globe and Mail

I remember vividly the time I almost met Estonian-born architect Uno Prii. On a cold and windy night in late 2000, a friend and I joined a small group in a basement room of the Lillian H. Smith Library on College Street for a lecture and slide show on postwar Annex apartment buildings. The presentation was being given by Taddle Creek magazine essayist Alfred Holden, and his special guest was to be Mr. Prii. I was quite excited at the prospect of hearing Toronto's most imaginative exponent of 1960s modernism speak. I'd always admired the flared base and tapering tower of his building at 20 Prince Arthur St. (Mr. Prii's favourite, too, I later learned), and his rounded “flower tower” at 44 Walmer Rd., with its Jetsons-esque courtyard fountain. Imagine my dismay when we were told that Mr. Prii had passed away just a few days before. By all accounts, Mr. Prii was a character as buoyant as his buildings, and he left us, unfortunately, just as his architecture was making a comeback. Despite being criticized by his peers for not taking architecture seriously enough, by the 1990s, he was being discovered by a whole new generation of architects and architectural junkies like me. His bold buildings were a breath of fresh air in a city where, more often than not, architects took the safer path during a quarter-century flirtation with modernism.