Random Access

Who's that sexy lady who will be lounging around the key street corner of our city centre for the foreseeable future?
Of course, that's no lady, that's the Marilyn Monroe of architectural contests at least if you believe what you read this morning in the Toronto press.
It's quite amazing, and pleasing, to see all the buzz that the Absolute Residential Design Competition has garnered for the city.
On Tuesday, it was announced that the most striking of many striking entries in the global contest sponsored by Fernbrook Homes and Citizen Developments had won, the sinuous, slightly twisted proposal by Yansong Ma of MAD.
"We didn't want to do a sexy building, but the public thinks it's sexy," said Ma at the press conference where the event was held at the CN Tower in Toronto.
Who is he kidding? This 50-storey building is turbo-charged sexy but not in a tacky artificial Pamela Andersen, or Marilyn kind of way. More like early pouting Bardot, or even better, Jean Seberg, sleek and slightly troubled.
Of course, anything out of the turgid rectangular glass box mode that seems to dominate all high rise congregations would have been acceptable.
But this design was clearly the front-runner to send the message that the City and contest originators wanted to send: our downtown is open for business and we're no longer mired in the mundane.
"I'm proud that the City has the confidence to go ahead and do something original," said McCallion, who joked that she would now have to settle for second place in the local sexy lady competition. (Gives new meaning to the phrase The Empress Has No Clothes, doesn't it?)
Before the winner was announced yesterday, McCallion told a breakfast meeting of the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Peel that she hoped Marilyn Monroe would win. Those sexy dames always stick together.
One thing that's quite clear about this whole exercise is that the Toronto architectural community has its nose thoroughly out of joint because Mississauga has been the location for the first open international competition in the GTA in the last 40 years, and not you-know-who.
How else do you account for a blurb in Toronto Life Magazine titled Best Development in a Suburban Wasteland that ends like this: "Mock the soccer-mom suburb all you want but it's wealthy, diverse and increasingly urbane, and it's creeping up on its smug big-city neighbours to the east."
So if you want to see urbane, Toronto, just go west, man. Just go west.