The Globe and Mail

This week's decision by the city's waterfront design review panel to rubber-stamp a ho-hum building by architect Jack Diamond on a spectacular lake site is hardly surprising. Mediocre building is the legacy of Toronto's waterfront, and part of the long, unrequited love affair Torontonians -- including planners, architects and citizens -- have sustained with Lake Ontario. The lake gives of itself every day. It isn't to blame. What is remarkable is the regular disdain hurled at its endless vistas, its meditative waters, its furious, seething mass. And, so, the latest rebuff: a 10-storey building broken politely into two pieces and clad in a cold skin of glass. There is no kindly gesture extended to the water, not even a graceful canopy to acknowledge the lake. But there is a large, gaping entrance to a parking garage within metres of the crashing waves, and an atrium that depends on artificial lighting to achieve something like luminosity.