Toronto Star

If more proof were needed about why Toronto will never achieve the greatness it craves, it was provided this week by the Waterfront Design Review Panel. Created by the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. and chaired by Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara, its responsibility is to ensure that redevelopment of the city's waterfront meets the highest architectural standards. Instead of doing that, however, the panel bent over backwards to accommodate a proposal, Project Symphony, that by the body's own admission sets the bar as low as it could get away with. The scheme, designed by Diamond Schmitt Architects for an unnamed client on publicly owned land at the foot of Jarvis St., would be unremarkable even it were located along, say, Highway 400. But as the first project on a major site on the water's edge, it says loud and clear that it's business as usual in Toronto, that architecture is at best of secondary importance and that the interests of business take precedence over those of the city.