Nonfiction. Travel Writing. Architecture. Illustrated by Marlena Zuber. What is the "Toronto look"? Toronto architecture is rich with superlative facts--"tallest" this, "first retractable" that--but, taken as a whole, the city's built environment is underappreciated. Eye Weekly columnist Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto's architecture for many years, weaving historical information on its buildings and their architects with ambulatory narratives about the neighborhoods in which these buildings exist. Rebecca Solnit once said that "cities move at the speed of walking," and STROLL celebrates Toronto's details at that velocity. While hand-drawn maps by Marlena Zuber encourage strollers to follow the walks, book in hand, Micallef's psychogeographic reportages help us situate Toronto's buildings in living, breathing detail, and understand what it is that gives Toronto its distinctive look. Shawn Micallef is a senior editor at Spacing magazine and co-founder of [murmur], the location-based mobile-phone documentary project. He writes about cities, culture, buildings, art, and whatever is interesting in books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. |