Review
It's been a while since I've had a huge crush on a book, but on May 18, I was introduced to
Stroll. A smart, adventurous, literate-yet-outdoorsy city boy,
Stroll knows both its history and its way around town, and advocates "dressing to impress" wherever one wanders.' – Open Book Toronto
Product Description
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. Here, glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.
Eye Weekly columnist Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto's architecture for many years, weaving historical information on its buildings and their architects with expansive ambulatory narratives about the neighbourhoods in which these buildings exist. Stroll collects Micallef's expanded columns alongside a number of new, unpublished essays; together, these psychogeographic reportages situate Toronto's buildings in living, breathing detail, and tell us more about the people who use them, how it feels to be exploring them in the middle of the night and the unintended ways in which they're evolving.
Writer Rebecca Solnit said that 'cities move at the speed of walking.' Stroll celebrates Toronto's details – some subtle, others grand – at that velocity and, in so doing, helps us understand what impact its many buildings, from the CN Tower to Pearson Airport's Terminal One and New City Hall, have on those who live there.
Features dozens of hand-drawn maps by artist Marlena Zuber, a foreword by architecture critic John Bentley Mays, a flâneur manifesto and a four-panel fold-out colour map.
