The Globe and Mail

It's rare that I find anything truly positive to say about developers. For the most part, they operate according to bottom-line interests, throwing up towers high and dirty, exploiting particular sites without a care for what's going up next door. In the capitalist world, in cities operating without alternative visionary plans, that's their prerogative. How to love the city with architecture is an argument rarely made by those who build them. But Julie Di Lorenzo is a developer who has come of age. Her latest condominium development, One City Hall, is a stellar contribution to downtown Toronto. Located at the edge of Chinatown, on a site that was considered scruffy and undesirable even though it lay directly behind the iconic City Hall, the building distinguishes itself as a 16-storey piece of modernism that wraps around a courtyard. It's a rare mid-sized offering for the downtown, built for a construction cost of $65-million, with details fought hard for and won.