The Globe and Mail

The University of Toronto's billion-dollar rollout of new buildings, now in full swing, has been good for students who need reasonably priced places downtown to park their socks. The new residences popping up on the St. George campus are hardly the quick-built, gloomy cinderblock bunkers I remember from undergraduate days in an American university. Instead of going cheap, the U of T is investing in good architects -- Thom Mayne for Graduate House, for example, and Gilles Saucier for the New College dormitory -- and, not surprisingly, getting good, intelligent and occasionally controversial architecture for the money. (We Torontonians, who shun the grand gesture, will probably never forgive Mr. Mayne for the big steel O punching out from Graduate House over the middle of Harbord Street.)