Towering ambitions: the architecture of modern Toronto.

• Author: Fulford, Robert
• Position: Toronto, Canada

It is altogether fitting that the CN Tower, a thick concrete pencil pushed through a gleaming steel donut into the clouds, serves these days as the visual symbol of Toronto on everything from postcards to the logos of television stations. It dominates the skyline for miles in any direction, and if you approach Toronto by air, water, or highway you see the CN Tower before you see anything else. Inside the city, walking or driving, you glimpse that unmistakable phallic shape everywhere, looming over hundreds of quiet residential streets, the only landmark visible above all the roofs. Its omnipresence recalls a remark by nineteenth-century French writer Guy de Maupassant: "I like to have lunch at the Eiffel Tower, because that's the only place in Paris from which you can't see the Eiffel Tower."

Which suggests the first reason the CN Tower makes an appropriate image for the architecture of the city: Toronto people feel ambivalent about it, as they feel ambivalent about much of their built environment. Ambivalence is a major local characteristic. On the one hand, Torontonians speak with a certain pride of the polished, highly diverse, sometimes playful, and intensely internationalized city that they built, between 1950 and 1990, on top of the old British metropolis created in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. On the other hand, they just as often wonder aloud whether they have not made some gigantic mistake in building so much so high so fast. Even Patricia McHugh's delightful Toronto architecture: A City Guide, a mainly enthusiastic inventory of the townscape, contains this rueful remark about recent construction: "Toronto may soon have the best second-rate architecture in the world!" Not many guidebooks offer that sort of opinion: most cities suffer from architectural mediocrity, but perhaps only Toronto obsessively worries about it in public.

If the subject of the CN Tower comes up in conversation with visitors, local people will almost certainly mention that it is the tallest freestanding structure on earth (1,815 feet) and then immediately add that they do not care for it all that much and have never bothered to ride the elevator up to the restaurant or the observation platform. In fact, it is hard to find a Torontonian willing to say a kind word about the tower--most people won't go any further than acknowledging that maybe we'll someday learn to love it as Paris reluctantly learned to love the Eiffel.

The CN Tower speaks eloquently of the period in which it was built. A century from now, cultural historians, the local equivalents of John Ruskin, will study it as a way of searching for the soul of Toronto in the 1970s. It went up in 1976 as the corporate creation and symbol of Canadian National, a historic railway and telegraph agency. It exists for two reasons: to transmit telecommunications signals and to assert its own importance. In that, too, it was very Toronto-ish. In the mid-1970s the city was struggling, successfully, to shake off the dowdy self-image that was part of its heritage as a colonial city perpetually living in someone else's shadow: too British to be American, too American to be British, and too prosperous and cosmopolitan to be properly Canadian. About the time the CN Tower was being planned, Torontonians were starting to consider, with awestruck pleasure, the possibility that their city might be interesting and even enviable. After all, a dozen or so magazine articles and TV documentaries in the U.S. were caressing our civic ego by describing Toronto as "the city that works," a swiftly growing urban centre that has somehow escaped the gravest problems of cities elsewhere on the continent. At that happy moment, the CN Tower was a way to reinforce the new local exuberance by demanding even more attention.

It was also appropriate, given Toronto's role in Canada and the world, that a communications tower should become a municipal emblem. Toronto functions as not only the center of broadcasting, publishing, advertising, and filmmaking in English Canada but also a pioneer (and an international power) in the development...