If you live in Toronto, you need to know about the Pug Awards; the 4th annual people choice awards for architecture. They give Torontonians (actually, anyone with a web connection) a chance to give a ‘tip of the hat’ or ‘wag of the finger’ to Toronto buildings completed in the last year. HomeZilla loves events like this because it helps share information about a city. After all, we are trying to be ‘The one-stop shop for Canadian home buyers looking for neighbourhood information’. Special thanks to Lisa Rochon for her Pug Awards article in the Globe.

There are 21 buildings on their list for voting. Check out HomeZilla’s map of all the locations (or for the geeks, download our Pug Awards KML file and make your own maps mash-up). How many of the buildings did I like? Not many… only 5 of the 21 got a ‘tip of my hat’. This is very unfortunate as these new building are going to be part of Toronto for the next 40, 50, 60 years or more.

The Pug Awards concept is fantastic. This competition gives a voice to the wisdom of crowds to help define the direction of our city, Toronto. Imagine how you would feel if a beautiful new building was added to your neighbourhood. What if it was a terrible building? Architecture can make or break a community. But architecture is subjective, what flies in Toronto won’t work in San Francisco or New York.

6 Laurier Ave

Does winning a Pug Award increase the desirability of a building? Very likely. Young condo owning urbanites want to live in the ‘cool’ building; they don’t want to know that 40,000 of the 50,000 voters hated where they live. Could Pug Awards losers end up en route to becoming a dilapidated building in the style of St. James Town highrises? Probably not, but designers beware. When the wisdom of crowds is unleashed, unexpected results happen.

Make your voice heard… vote in the Pug Awards… let’s tell developers how we want our city to look; results to be annouced June 5th. But remember, just reward those you really love. We don’t want the Toronto Pug Awards to have the same credibility as a Toronto standing ovation.

This entry was posted Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Community, Misc, Neigbourhoods, Trends. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.