I came across this amazing house while browsing my 2008 Autumn issue of International Architecture and Design. This house was designed by Toronto architect Ian McDonald in 2002 and was awarded the 2008 Governor General’s Medals in Architecture. Simply stunning!
Comment from the Jury
This house gives the split-level bungalow type a whole new meaning. The strategy seems to erode and intertwine the domestic structure of street frontage, back yard and neighbouring setbacks within the modest volume of a vintage bungalow, where spaces are brilliantly mined from the site rather than added to the structure. The result is a sequence of compact indoor and outdoor “rooms” that unexpectedly unravel into exquisite grand moments of expansion.
Canada’s newest bouldering gym, Boulderz, hosted the third leg of the Eastern division of the Tour de Bloc this weekend, on January 10th 2009. The event was organized beautifully, especially considering how short noticed the plans for this event were. Boulderz is a beautiful bouldering gym near downtown Toronto boasting amazing features, lots of perfectly angled walls, and a ton of brand new holds. Far from being new to the bouldering scene, the owner Andrew, knows what boulderers what: A great facility, with an awesome atmosphere, and loads of new problems/holds. And on that front, Boulderz delivers. However, I digress. One of the problems for this competition was the size of the gym (capacity of about 50-60 climbers), some participants, and organizers were concerned that the space wouldn’t be enough for a Tour de Bloc competition. The organizers were clever enough to top the number of registrants to a max of 50, splitting the beginners/rec and open, to give climbers a little more room to run around.
I am psyched to say that this leg of the tour was a huge success on all accounts. The problem setting was nearing perfection, thanks to the organizer’s planning, which gave the setters about 15 hours to forerun the problems. The qualifying problems weren’t too hard so that people did manage to finish the top 5 problems, and they were also very well spread out so that competitors didn’t have to wait 30 minutes to climb a problem. The finals were absolutely perfect for the crowd. Just hard enough for the women to finish all of them (top two finish all three problems!), but also hard enough to kick some butts in order to give us a good spread during the finals. Very well done!
I do want to plug one comment about the comp, and it is now the second comp in a row to do this (Climber’s Rock did it too). When the women who qualified first is climbing the second problem, the setters are too quick to put up the problems for the men’s final which is really distracting for both the crowd and the climber. I think that waiting for the last women (first in qualifying round) to finish problem 2 before they start putting up the men’s problems would be nice. In fact, they could wait until the women’s field is completely done before starting the men’s problems as it takes away from the show the best women (according to the qualifying round) will be giving the crowd on the last problem. Just my two cents here. Other than that, brilliant comp. Congrats Jodi and Luigi, and thank you for putting such great comps!
Results: Women’s Open
- Erin Ford-Zieleniewski
- Bonnie de Bruijn
- Amanda Berezowski
- Nicole Ko
- Brigitte Robert
- Allysa Herzig
Results: Men’s Open
- Dustin Curtis
- Jean-Marc Grenier
- Ayo Sopeju
- Tash Zielinski
- Andre Cheuk
- Jamie Stuart
- Dave Voltan
- Tony Berlier
Every now and then, a huge mass of suburbanites invade our neighborhood for a whole bunch of parties, games, or shows. Tonight was especially weird because of the mixture of the different people in the crowd. The somewhat more sophisticated crowd going to see the Divine Performing Arts, the young (and old frankly) full of energy crowd going at the Rogers Center for the AC/DC concert, and finally the young sporty people going to watch the Raptors kill the Grizzlies at the Air Canada Center. Anyways, it was pretty interesting to see the crazy mix of people downtown tonight. It was kind of a free for all in the LCBO at union station. yikes.
