Crystallizing Toronto's identity: what the city's new architecture says about us.

In a city made nervous by big moves, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal was a huge gamble. The chaotic pile of steel on Bloor Street that hung around far too long, the endless uncertainty as to whether what we were seeing was in fact the building's final exterior cladding, the collateral chatter of rumour and gossip--all are now resolved. After an interminable reverse striptease, that over-boned skeleton is finally dressed. The Lee-Chin Crystal has arrived, glinting its angular presence along Bloor Street. Its exterior is remarkable. The interior is spectacular, unlike anything else in the world.

The ROM's dramatic makeover is just one of several architectural high-wire acts that Toronto has been watching open-mouthed in the past few years as each of its major cultural institutions reinvents itself. Their combined architectural impact represents one of the strongest statements of cultural confidence to be found in any contemporary city. But what many of its citizens, myself included, are trying to figure out is what exactly is being said.

The designs for the National Ballet School and the Royal Conservatory of Music by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects and the Canadian Opera Company's new building by Diamond and Schmitt Architects, both locally based firms, are in their separate ways perfectly formed examples of the restrained modernism that is becoming the house style for the city. The overall effect is akin to seeing one's grown-up son in a perfectly tailored suit for the first time, wondering quite where this child has come from, delighting in his arrival.

The architects from away, however, are telling us something completely different. First to arrive was the Sharp Centre for Design. This delightfully ridiculous tabletop expansion of the Ontario College of Art and Design by UK architect Will Alsop flies with an insouciant lightness of being over the college's utterly ordinary McCaul Street main building. No one had shown such lack of architectural restraint in the city since Sir Henry Pellat's absurd pile, Casa Loma. Just down the street is Frank Gehry's makeover of the Art Gallery of Ontario, with its swoosh of metal and glass fronting Dundas and the new monolith rising on the park now provoking a nervousness analogous to that of the first sightings of the Lee-Chin Crystal.

Why did Will Alsop's building, which makes people smile and laugh, strike so positive a chord in the city? Why have Libeskind's--and soon I'm sure Gehry's--finished schemes put to rest our initial anxiety? Is this the careful, cautious Toronto we know? The Toronto so astutely captured in Margaret Atwood's late '80s novel Cat's Eye?

Underneath the flourish and ostentation is the old city, street after street of thick red brick houses, with their front porch pillars like the off-white stems of toadstools and their watchful, calculating windows. Malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable.

Nice place, that city! But the enthusiastic reaction both to the elegant modernism of our hometown architects and to the more radical interventions of the outsiders could well be heralding the profound, almost existential, transformation that has been taking place in Toronto over the past decade, a collective emergence from the worrisome odour of decline so pervasive in the '90s.

Toronto's sense of itself as the city that works, as the city of neighbourhoods, as the peaceable civic kingdom had become increasingly at odds not just with the competitive reality of other surging cities but with the obvious decay of our infrastructure, public realm, and social cohesion. Our city, gleefully abandoned by its country and province and increasingly irrelevant in the wider world, was sinking. Collectively, these buildings now tell a very different story.

How does a city turn itself around to take the bold initiatives necessary to gain and maintain status as a significant global centre? A question particularly poignant for a place with so strong a domestic strain in its municipal makeup, so cautious of any actions beyond the comfortable confines of the local, the community, and the street, a city whose patron saint is that advocate of all things local, Jane Jacobs. When Frank Gehry was retained by the Art Gallery of Ontario, he was subjected to a painstaking "community" review. Perhaps the greatest architect of our time was subjected to vocal locals' critiques of his building's height, massing, traffic impact, and streetscape. Not for Toronto the artistic freedom of other cities. At a recent conference in Lyon, the representatives of Bilbao recounted how vigorously local residents had objected to Gehry's masterpiece, the new Guggenheim, and how quite properly they had been ignored. "Urban regeneration is an affair of state on which local residents can thus have no bearing," opined one of their cultural grandees. What absurd arrogance! But look who were creating the glorious modern cities. At home, the object of Jacobs's affection had strangely regressed into Atwood's city.

Surprisingly, the impetus for our urban cultural renaissance came from the Conservative government of Mike Harris, a man not immediately thought of as a friend of our city, but someone who recognized that a new urban spirit could best be represented by new buildings. So credit has to be given for Ontario's dogged persistence in striking a funding agreement with the federal government that would allow five major cultural institutions to undertake major expansions and a sixth, the Canadian Opera Company, to create a brand new opera house.

That agreement secured contributions from the two senior governments of approximately a quarter billion dollars; and for providing such essential funding they deserve great credit. What is less well appreciated--and this is the real story of the remaking of our city--is that three times that amount was collectively fundraised for the six building projects in a relatively short and overlapping time period. Anyone who thought in the early '90s that donations of such an order of magnitude were achievable would have been assured such things were not possible in Toronto. But we did it, and at a level of contribution probably proportionately greater than any other city. The citizens, led it has to be said by the city's elite, deserve to take the biggest bow. As do the set of extraordinary cultural entrepreneurs, notably Richard Bradshaw at the COC, Matthew Teitelbaum at the AGO, and William Thorsell at the ROM, all stalwart captains of perilous building enterprises, who nevertheless got them built and paid for. Great cities are made by great people; what is remarkable is the way those people seem spontaneously to arise.

We are fortunate that the people of Toronto have been so generous. University Avenue, the boulevard that links all but one of our cultural renaissance buildings, features broken sidewalks, desiccated trees, and neglected street furniture-testimony to the unsettling absence of leadership at the level of government nominally responsible for our urban future, the City of Toronto. The city contributed nothing to the funding of the cultural buildings and indeed, despite having received over half a million dollars in building permit fees from the ROM alone, had the temerity initially to demand a $2,400 annual levy on the tip of Libeskind's crystal that leans into Bloor Street. Atwood's city endures on the floor of city council.

But behind the ROM, in the quiet of the tree-lined Philosophers' Walk, a different classic city voice can be heard: that of Robertson Davies, the novelist of this part of town. "Flat-footed, hard-breathing, high-aspiring Toronto," is how Davies described us in The Cunning Man. Davies took a rambunctious delight in skewering the pretensions of a city that to him was irredeemably, endearingly provincial, a gawky urban adolescent not quite sure which fork to use. Have we in our unprecedented architectural ostentation avoided the perils of Atwood's grudging city only to be caught in Davies' trap of nouveau-riche self-aggrandizement?

Well, he, too, might have misjudged the force of the new. There have been times before when the city has shaken loose from its two stereotypes, when something greater than "flat-footed" has emerged from its "malicious, implacable" streets. In a glorious moment in the '60s and early '70s, New City Hall, the TD Centre, Ontario Place, and the Eaton Centre all announced the arrival of new possibilities for the place where we live. We are at a similar moment now. The six new buildings are sending two clear messages after all: first, that any great city will have its own distinctive style of excellence, bred from its own internal gene pool; and second, that our city lives in a larger world, one that is by turns funny, lyrical, and frightening. The city now seems ready to hear both messages reflected in its buildings.

In the new ROM, while there is an intensely European sensibility at work, that wider world, the modern world, is clearly in evidence. Libeskind is best known as an architect who attempts in his buildings to reconcile the horrors of the modern world with life in the modern city; the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, UK, and the tortured commission to remake the World Trade Center site in New York City--all are sculptural searches for such reconciliation. That does not make them easy buildings. Libeskind shares with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas a mistrust of sentimentality, of the "niceness" that is always Toronto's temptation. Not for him the comforting curvilinearity of Frank Gehry's building. The past and the future, harsh and honest, have arrived in the new ROM.

But that is now our city. The modern world has crashed in, and more than half its citizens will soon be visible minorities, too many of them forced to leave cruel, angular circumstances elsewhere. Of all the renaissance buildings, Libeskind's dramatic, uncompromising remake of the ROM may be the most accurate statement of where our city is now headed, a bewildering, anxious, global megalopolis that neither Margaret Atwood nor Robertson Davies--let alone the rest of us--can fully comprehend. It is, however, telling us something that may be more true to our deepest cultural coding--that Toronto is never more itself than when it embraces the future.