By David Topping

When Google rolled out the Street View version of Google Maps, a rift in the space/time continuum (or, so they claim, an error in stitching together the shots) appeared to produce, from some viewpoints in the city, duplicate CN Towers. But Google wasn’t done with our poor CN Tower—no, now that Google Maps also features wireframe renderings of many downtown buildings, the Tower’s been stripped of its charm and turned into the city’s tallest and girth-iest perfect cylinder, seemingly the result of an algorithm that determines the outline of a building’s base and then pairs it with that building’s height.
A few of Toronto’s other iconic but weirdly-shaped downtown buildings didn’t fare much better, either:

City Hall, above, becomes a walled fortress, somehow even more ominous than the building that starred in Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

OCAD’s be-stilted Sharp Centre for Design: newly boring.

U of T’s Robarts Library just looks like it wants a hug.

And, probably for the better, Google didn’t even attempt to render the horror of geometry that is the Royal Ontario Museum.