You Ain't Got No Alibi

Hey Star readers. An article published in the Ideas section of today's paper, titled "Why Toronto's got style," opened with this:

Toronto. Style. When describing the greater city's architecture, can the two words be used together?

"If you really stop and look, Toronto is butt ugly," says a blogger's entry on a hot, unresolved, topic – does Toronto have its own style of architecture? – at the popular website Torontoist.com.

The city, the blogger ruthlessly writes, is "very squat, flat, bland, cheap buildings, sort of shabby."

Those looking for the relevant discussion here won't have much luck, as that quotation is actually a comment left in reply to an open-ended question we posed last year: Is Toronto Ugly? (That particular comment is here and, like all comments, is not a "blogger's entry" on our site, just as letters to the editor in the Star aren't articles.) Though the comment thread is almost a year old, we still welcome discussion, from all corners.

We encourage Star readers who aren't readers of Torontoist to check out some of our recent posts tagged with "architecture," read editions of our short-lived column Bad Buildings, or to learn more about us and see some of our more popular posts. (Advanced warning, though: while we do like the Star, we also like occasionally giving them a hard time.)